Powershell Tips

Questions about health check script

I recieved a comment that contained a question about my previous post about writing a script to output a health check of SQL Server.

 http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.co…

The following is the question:

should we make anychanges for this do and what are the fields i need to provide at this columns: #Read thru the contents of the SQL_Servers.txt file
#$servers = Import-Csv “\pni-vmdbasqld$monitoringinputssqltab.txt”
$servers = Import-Csv “\ent-pocpacapcx01d$monitoringsqltab.txt”

So You should make changes to the $servers variable and point it to the input file that you are going to be using. My csv file has the following columns in it and you can adjust to yours to make it fit your needs.

Monitor,Server,Instance,TorP,ErrorLog,Ping,OS2000

Those are the things that I have found that I use in multiple scripts to deal with SQL Server. The Monitor is jsut a Y or N value to tell my monitoring scripts if I want to monitor that server at this time. Then the physical host name is the Server value, instance is NULL if default and the name of the instance if named, TorP is T if the server is Test and P if Prod, ErrorLog is the location of the errorlog on the filesystem, Ping is also a Y or N value used by my Ping Servers Script to tell it if I want it to be pinged, and OS200 tells my scripts if the server is running Server 2000 or not. That is important since OS2000 can not have Powershell installed.

Hope that helps and if you have any other questions or comments please let me know.

Powershell Profile

The Powershell Profile is a script that druns anytime you launch Powershell. This is handy so you can ste up variables, add snapins, or just do what ever you like or think is cool when launching Powershell. I was just editing mine, which you can do by:

notepad $profile

This will pull up your profile so you can edit the script. If you would like to know where the script is located then just do a $profile to get the full path. Anyway after I edited my profile I wanted to reload the profile so that all the new things I just added would be available in my current powershell session. Like most things in Powershell this is simple.

. $profile

This will re-run the profile script and now all your new goodies are available

Find how many files of any extension are in a folder

Recently I needed to find out if I had any files of a certain extension in a particular folder and if so how many. With Powershell this is no problem at all.

Say I was looking for a count of .ps1 files in the directory.

@(Dir Directorypath\*.ps1).Count

The @() makes the result go into an array object. This way no matter what you will get an accurate count without having to do a for loop on that directory.