Okay so technically it’s all PowerShell right?!? Well yes and no… more yes. Sure, when you use the EMC Message Tracking tool, it creates the PowerShell command at the bottom of the window for you to copy and modify as you see fit. For simple reports for one user on one Exchange server this is fine. As soon as you need to run more complex reports for multiple user and servers you’ll quick see that doing it directly from PowerShell is much more effective.
Recently I was asked to run a number of reports based off 100+ users on multiple Exchange servers. The EMC Message Tracking GUI is limited to running reports on one user and one server at a time so this just wouldn’t cut it for my situation.
So how do you make get-messagetrackinglog retrieve reports on multiple users and servers in one script? Unfortunately you can’t just put multiple email addresses or servers after a parameter.
The trick here is to use the foreach-object cmdlet. We can place all our users and servers into a variable and then use foreach (alias to foreach-object) to loop through all of our arguments.
In the below example I also use a variable for an output file and starting / ending date ranges. In my situation it was about recycling the script for different reports as quickly as possible.
$servers = "server1","server2"
$senders = "[email protected]","[email protected]"
$outputfile = "C:tempoutput.csv
$start = “DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM:SS”
$end = “DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM:SS”
$(foreach ($sender in $senders) {
$(foreach ($server in $servers) {
Get-MessageTrackingLog -Sender $sender -Start $start -End $end -EventID “SEND” -Server $server -resultsize unlimited | select Timestamp, @{Name=”Recipients”;expression={$_.Recipients}}, MessageSubject, Sender
})}) | sort-object -property timestamp | Export-CSV -path $outputfile
We’ve now turned a basic command into quite a flexible script for receiving message logs out of exchange.
If you’re going to work out of Excel (or something similar) the sort-object is probably superfluous. Where it’s useful is if you choose to output to the screen to quickly check what’s being returned.
By replacing
Export-CSV -path $outputfile
With
Format-Table –autosize
You can quickly see what results are returned. Just remember to increase your screen buffer through the Powershell Window properties, else some columns might not be returned.
WARNING: 2 columns do not fit into the display and were removed.
Finally a note on the -resultsize parameter. Without it your results would be limited to 1000.