Team City 9.1.7 - Report to TC that a build has started and monitor/report on output of specific process?

Afternoon,

My organization uses Team City 9.1.7 for our build and selenium testing needs, with the exception of the AutoIt automated tests for our legacy Windows apps, which have always been run manually.

We have AutoIt writing out into the standard output the info that Team City needs for test start, pass/fail, and test end. The problem is that when trying to run the tests from Team City, AutoIt reports back that it cannot launch the application in question. The only way the tests seem to run is if we run the tests directly from the VM.

What I would like to do is be able to run the test from the VM, but report the test results back to Team City. Is there a way to tell team city that I've started a "build", to monitor the standard output for test start/pass/fail/complete, and report a final build finished when the last test completes, without triggering it from the Team City UI? This is all performed on a machine that a build agent is configured on.

Alternatively, if anyone knows of a way to get AutoIt to run correctly when kicked off from Team City, that would of course be the ideal solution.

Thanks!