How to remotely register static ETW manifests as part of a website deployment?

Question

I'm doing a pilot effort to use the new EventSource (Microsoft.Diagnostics.Tracing.EventSource from nuget) and its new support for ETW channels in order to write to the windows event log. The code is in place, and it writes properly to my workstations event log. I'm thrilled.

Now comes the difficult part. The application that's taking advantage of this capability is a web service, and we deploy it with webdeploy as part of a build-deploy-test system. Because usage of ETW channels requires static registration of provider manifests via wevtutil.exe. The EventSource documentation states that this is best done as part of an installer, but this seems a bit out of webdeploy's capabilities.

Our aim is that we would be able to automatically uninstall the manifest resident on the target server immediately before executing the webdeploy package, and then to import the new manifest after the webdeploy sync has completed. We're not set on this, but it seems like the most sensible way.

For that reason, it seems like maybe this is something that powershell remoting might be able to solve, but it's not an area I know much about.

Has anyone done something like this? Is there a better or simpler way?

Answer 1

There are only a few requirements here. A) the remote machine must have PowerShell remoting enable which also means it must have PowerShell 2.0 or higher B) the script running on the local machine must be able to run as administrator and the credentials used must have admin privileges on the remote machine. If you can meet those requirements then this should be cake.

On the remote machine you need to execute two commands to enable remoting:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
Enable-PSRemoting -Force

Then on the local machine from an elevated prompt you should be able to execute something like this from a script:

# these two paths assume these files have been copied to the remote computer and to a directory
# in which the service account has privileges to read i.e. not under a userprofile dir.
$etwDllPath = c:\somepath\myassembly.mysourcename.etwManifest.dll
$etwManPath = c:\somepath\myassembly.mysourcename.etwManifest.man
$s = New-PSSession -ComputerName <remoteComputerName>
Invoke-Command -Session $s {param($man) wevtutil.exe um $man} -arg $etwManPath
Invoke-Command -Session $s {param($man,$dll) wevutil.exe im $man /rf:$dll /mf:$dll} -arg $etwManPath, $etwDllPath
Remove-PSSession $s

If you can avoid a remote path with spaces, try to. It will make this easier. :-)