The other day I stumbled across a powershell that is useful for checking out the age of a process running on a computer, unfortunately I cannot remember where I discovered it and therefore cannot give the relevant credit to the creator.<\/p>\n
I can here many of you say, about why is this Powershell script important and why have I placed it alongside the Veeam information?<\/p>\n
The answer to these questions is simple, the powershell script is especially useful when using Veeam Backup & Replication and it was due to a situation I had when using Veeam Backup & Replication that allowed me to look for the script in the first place.<\/p>\n
With Veeam Backup & Replication v6, the Management Server communicates with the Proxies and starts up the VeeamAgent.exe process when backing up or replicating.\u00a0 Each task that is running, will create a process like this.\u00a0 In some circumstances, a Backup job may freeze even though other jobs are running through smoothly.\u00a0 I knew that if you kill the VeeamAgent.exe process, it would stop the backup job and allow you to restart it later… unfortunately I didn’t want to stop all VeeamAgent.exe processes on the proxy as that would kill the backup jobs that are working fine.\u00a0 If I knew the age of the VeeamAgent.exe processes and compare the start time with the start time of the virtual machine backup that has frozen… I would then be able to kill just that process and allow the other backup tasks to continue running.<\/p>\n
So here is the script:<\/p>\n
[cmdletbinding()]<\/p>\n
param(<\/p>\n
$ComputerName=$env:COMPUTERNAME,<\/p>\n
[parameter(Mandatory=$true)]<\/p>\n
$ProcessName<\/p>\n
)<\/p>\n
$Processes = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Process -ComputerName $ComputerName -Filter “name=’$ProcessName'”<\/p>\n
if($Processes) {<\/p>\n
foreach ($process in $processes) {<\/p>\n
$processid = $process.handle<\/p>\n
$processcreationtime = $Process.Converttodatetime($Process.creationdate)<\/p>\n
write-host “`nThe $ProcessName `($processid`) process creation time is $processcreationtime”<\/p>\n
}<\/p>\n
} else {<\/p>\n
write-host “`nNo Process found with name $ProcessName”<\/p>\n
}<\/p>\n
write-host “”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This script should be saved in a .ps1 file and stored somewhere on your network.\u00a0 To run the script, start up Powershell.\u00a0 I find it easier to browse to the folder where the script is located and execute the following command:<\/p>\n
.\/nameofscript<\/em>.ps1 -ComputerName NameofComputer<\/em> -ProcessName NameofProcess<\/em><\/p>\n So for in my environment, I actually have it available on the server that is the Veeam Proxy and therefore I start it as the following:<\/p>\n .\/get-processage.ps1 -ProcessName VeeamAgent.exe<\/p>\n <\/p>\n At this poing you will see something similar to below:<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/virtualworlduk.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/process.jpg\" "\\"process\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n