Let's try to make a quick win. We have to make a Proof Of Concept about something and writing a Web RestFul API is a good candidate.

All Windows laptops in your company are supposed to execute a script every day. However you have a lot of tickets that may be explained by the fact that this daily script is not executed or too long and raises a kind of timeout.

Your idea is to log when the script starts and when it ends. A good one! However you have no idea how to quickly centralize these log files from all laptops. Why not a Web RestFul API?

Before going further: yes I know that a lot of solutions may solve this issue but the target is to make the POC in less than one hour. As I used to develop Web Restful API then it is my choice.

From client side, we are going to use Powershell command as it is native to Windows 10.

client_side.ps1

# init
$who=whoami
$computer=hostname
$server="my-server.domain.com"
 
# before the main command, let's call the API
Invoke-WebRequest ("http://{2}:5000/my_action/start/{0}/{1}" -f ($who -replace "\\", "@"), $computer, $server) -Method POST
 
# main command
my_action
 
# after the main command, let's call the API
Invoke-WebRequest ("http://{2}:5000/my_action/stop/{0}/{1}" -f ($who -replace "\\", "@"), $computer, $server) -Method POST

API returns something like this:

StatusCode        : 201
StatusDescription : Created
Content           : {"user": "my_user", "action": "my_action", "ip_remote": "0.1.2.3", "computer":
                    "my_computer"}

RawContent        : HTTP/1.1 201 Created
                    Connection: close
                    Content-Length: 115
                    Content-Type: application/json
                    Date: Tue, 26 May 2020 13:46:28 GMT
                    Server: gunicorn/20.0.4

                    {"user": "my_user", "action": "my_acti...
Forms             : {}
Headers           : {[Connection, close], [Content-Length, 115], [Content-Type, application/json], [Date, Tue, 26 May 2020 13:46:28
                    GMT]...}
Images            : {}
InputFields       : {}
Links             : {}
ParsedHtml        : mshtml.HTMLDocumentClass
RawContentLength  : 115