The correct way to build a PowerShell PRTG EXEXML sensor JSON output.

I thought I should give back to the forum/community which has helped me a lot over the years. I've seen a lot of people writing PowerShell which builds text manually for JSON output. That's really fraught with danger in lots of ways.

The following PowerShell is an example of the _correct_ way to build a proper multidimensional object within PowerShell to pass to ConvertTo-JSON.

$jsonRoot = @{}
$jsonPrtgNode = @{}
$jsonResultsNode = @()

$resultHashTableItem = @{
    "channel"   = "Item Total"
    "unit"      = "Count"
    "mode"      = "Absolute"
    "showChart" = "1"
    "showTable" = "0"
    "warning"   = "0"
    "float"     = "0"
    "value"     = "123"
}
$jsonResultsNode += $resultHashTableItem

$resultHashTableItem = @{
    "channel"   = "Item Exit Total"
    "unit"      = "Count"
    "mode"      = "Absolute"
    "showChart" = "1"
    "showTable" = "0"
    "warning"   = "0"
    "float"     = "0"
    "value"     = "456"
}
$jsonResultsNode += $resultHashTableItem

$statusHashTableItem = @{
    "text"   = "Completed Sucessfully"
}
$jsonResultsNode += $statusHashTableItem

$jsonPrtgNode.Add("result",$jsonResultsNode)
$jsonRoot.Add("prtg",$jsonPrtgNode)

$jsonRoot | ConvertTo-Json -Depth 3

The output you will get from this example is the following

{
    "prtg":  {
                 "result":  [
                                {
                                    "channel":  "Item Total",
                                    "unit":  "Count",
                                    "showChart":  "1",
                                    "warning":  "0",
                                    "value":  "123",
                                    "mode":  "Absolute",
                                    "showTable":  "0",
                                    "float":  "0"
                                },
                                {
                                    "channel":  "Item Exit Total",
                                    "unit":  "Count",
                                    "showChart":  "1",
                                    "warning":  "0",
                                    "value":  "456",
                                    "mode":  "Absolute",
                                    "showTable":  "0",
                                    "float":  "0"
                                },
                                {
                                    "text":  "Completed Sucessfully"
                                }
                            ]
             }
}

I hope this helps someone avoid trying to build a large text/string output and makes their PowerShell JSON creation a lot more robust.

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