Build a Bandwidth Monitoring Tool with iPerf and PowerShell

Here are the initial instructions and explanation of the lab environment. Read this while your environment is busy creating itself from nothing. Yes, this violates physics; we know. How fun!

In this challenge, you'll be stepping through the process of setting up the iPerf tool to monitor bandwidth. You'll get hands-on practice with PowerShell Remoting, copying files to a remote server, running a quick test with iPerf, and cleaning up afterward. By the end of this challenge, you'll have a working iPerf instance running on the remote server, allowing you to understand how to perform real-time network bandwidth measurements.

Now that you’ve gotten a taste of what iPerf is and how to use it, you’ll begin integrating PowerShell into the mix. In this challenge, you will begin “wrapping” PowerShell around iPerf to invoke a bandwidth test.

When thinking of automating iPerf bandwidth tests, it’s important to build “conditional code.” This is the kind of code that checks the status of processes to make intelligent decisions as to what to do next. For this tool, you must build functionality to test whether or not iPerf is running on a remote server.

You’ve been invoking bandwidth tests and inspecting the results throughout this lab. But those results are just a big string of unstructured data. To build a PowerShell tool (especially a wrapper tool like this one), you should always focus on converting the unstructured data that CLI commands give you into easily consumable output.

Now it’s time to wrap all of this hard work up with a nice bow, and build a nice PowerShell module from it.