To visually determine if a website is loading slowly, or not, you might open the browser, enter the URL, and note the speed at which the page loads. Well, since I write tools to speed things up, writing one for this need, seemed to make sense. Part of the work was already done, thanks to the little function below that I had already written. It’s a function called Open-InternetExplorer and you can likely guess what it does. If you feed it a URL as the value for the -Url parameter, it’ll open up that webpage, otherwise, it’ll just open to the default homepage.

Set-Alias -Name iexplore -Value Open-InternetExplorer
Function Open-InternetExplorer {
    Param ([string]$Url)
 
    If ($Url) {
        Start-Process -FilePath iexplore $Url
    } Else {
        Start-Process -FilePath iexplore
    }
}

If you didn’t already notice, I’ve also included an alias be set for this function. With that in place, I can also enter iexplore to invoke the Open-InternetExplorer function. Notice that the Start-Process cmdlets inside the function include iexplore as the value for the -FilePath parameter. This is the Internet Explorer executable, and not the function alias.

Okay, so now we know how we can quickly open a new IE browser and determine what webpage to load. Let’s assume the page I want to check is http://appsrv01.subdomain.mydomain.com. This means, I can enter Open-InternetExplorer http://appsrv01.subdomain.mydomain.com and IE will open to that webpage (on that server). I may use a load balanced, front end URL for users to access the application, such as http://myapp.subdomain.mydomain.com. While the app is important (as it is one of the servers), knowing that all the app servers are responding and loading the page quickly is helpful.

For the remaining examples, let’s assume I have a variable called $MyAppServers that contains the default properties for five servers, returned from the Get-ADComputer cmdlet.

PS> $MyAppServers = Get-ADComputer -Filter * -SearchBase 'OU=MyApp,DC=subdomain,DC=mydomain,DC=com'
PS> $MyAppServers.Name
appsrv01
appsrv02
appsrv03
appsrv04
appsrv05

Now, let’s combine the $MyAppServers variable, with the function (and the ForEach-Object cmdlet, as the function wasn’t written to accept multiple URLs), so that we can open each app server’s webpage. This will allow us to determine if any of the pages load slower than any others, or more importantly, to determine if a page doesn’t load at all. Here’s how we do that.

PS> $MyAppServers.Name | ForEach-Object {Open-InternetExplorer -Url "$_.subdomain.mydomain.com"}

Once this command is run, it’ll open an Internet Explorer browser window for each app URL. In my case (Windows 8.1), I can hover over the IE taskbar items and view a small image of each IE window. Notice in the image below that one of the application servers didn’t load. I’ll need to look into that server!

While I haven’t yet, the command above could be added to its own function, so I don’t have to type it out each time, and instead can simply enter the function’s name, or alias. In closing, I’ll mention another small function I added to my profile. This one will dump all running instances of Internet Explorer, allowing me to avoid manually closing each IE window, or typing out the Get-Process–Stop-Process command that the function runs.

Set-Alias -Name diexplore -Value Stop-InternetExplorer
Function Stop-InternetExplorer {
    Get-Process -Name iexplore | Stop-Process
}