Quick Tips #2: Take a get-service Snapshot before Rebooting

Earlier this week I had to do some Windows updates on an application server cluster I wasn’t familiar with. Whenever rebooting servers like this, I’ve always been in the habit of quickly saving an output of running services from PowerShell while the server is in a normal working state, to reference if anything is amiss after the reboot, and it proved useful again this week.

Something as simple as below is nice and quick to run before rebooting:

Get-Service | Sort-Object Status -Descending | Out-File $env:userprofile\desktop\running_services.txt

Now you have a nice “snapshot” of running services to reference in the event of any issues after the reboot.

In my case, an essential service was for some reason set to Manual start, and being able to reference running services during the server’s normal state let me quickly identify the issue.