monitor-application-changes-powershell's Introduction

Monitor Application Changes by Isaac Good

Includes notification options for Syncro RMM and easily adaptable to others.

Created because other scripts have various deficiencies:

They compare raw text files (objects are easier to manipulate however you want)
They check installer event logs (not all installers create event log entries)
They check WMI/CIM/Get-Package (which doesn't return user profile context apps)
They can't excludes apps or types of changes (noise causes alert fatigue)
They don't store all apps for comparison so if exclusions change it could lead to undesired reporting
They don't detect in process installations and wait to avoid inaccurate alerts

Flaws:

If an application is updated whose DisplayName contains a date or version number not the same as present in DisplayVersion/MajorVersion/MinorVersion, the script may not identify it as Updated, so both Uninstalled and Installed versions are listed. Please be sure to report any cases of this you come across so the logic can be improved.

Future development ideas:

Add support for Windows Store Apps
List updated apps also when installed/uninstalled are found and updated is off (piggyback apps)
User/AllUser exclude/filtering?
32/64bit indicator?
Test behavior in Terminal Server environment
Improve error handling
Improve table output? (border/text alignment)

Changelog

1.1 / 2024-02-13
    Added - Computer name in email notification subject & body
    Added - $OutputListHTML for better looking list emails
    Changed - $OutputList to $OutputListText for naming consistency and cleaned up formatting section and documentation
    Fixed - Preserve $OutputListText spaces by replacing with ALT-255
    Fixed - $OutputTableHTML looks bad in tickets (I'm sure it used to work?), switched to use $OutputTableText instead
    Fixed - Ticket created but fails adding comment
1.0 / 2024-02-12 - Initial release

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monitor-application-changes-powershell's Issues

Is it possible to have this create a new alert whenever a new installation or uninstallation occurs?

It looks like the script attempts to update the Syncro Alert instead of populating a new one when this script runs if the alert was not previously cleared. So the updated date changes, but no new info is written to the alert. One way around this potentially is to automate the resolution of the alert, but the goal for us is to just use this to monitor these changes rather than create tickets for them.

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