Run multiple test-connection for one gridview output

Question

How can I use multiple Test-Connection cmdlets and put them all in one Out-GridView, or is there another solution to what I'm trying to do here? The point is to be able to ping multiple adresses after one another and have it all appear in the same window.

Answer 1

Feed your list of IP addresses (or hostnames) into a ForEach-Object loop running Test-Connection for each address, then pipe the result into Out-GridView:

$addr = '192.168.1.13', '192.168.23.42', ...
$addr | ForEach-Object {
  Test-Connection $_
} | Out-GridView

Note that this can be quite time-consuming, depending on the number of addresses you're checking, because all of them are checked sequentially.

If you need to speed up processing for a large number of addresses you can for instance run the checks as parallel background jobs:

$addr | ForEach-Object {
  Start-Job -ScriptBlock { Test-Connection $args[0] } -ArgumentList $_
} | Out-Null

$results = do {
  $running   = Get-Job -State Running
  Get-Job -State Completed | ForEach-Object {
    Receive-Job -Job $_
    Remove-Job -Job $_
  }
} while ($running)

$results | Out-GridView

Too much parallelism might exhaust your system resources, though. Depending on how much addresses you want to check you may need to find some middle ground between running things sequentially and running them in parallel, for instance by using a job queue.