Introduction
In my first post about Vester, I ended the post with a number of items that needs further investigation. On top of my list is some kind of reporting function. After submitting an Invoke-Vester command lots of information scrolls over the screen.
Figure 1. – Output Invoke-Vester
Most administrators will not agree with an unseen remediation of the errors found and desire some kind of overview. It would also be nice to have some kind of overview while running Invoke-Vester as a scheduled job. Fortunately, one of my colleagues (Thank you Alex!) gave me the idea to create a dashboard. As there are many monitoring and dashboards product available like Grafana and Graphite there is also the PowerShell Universal Dashboard module. The PowerShell Universal Dashboard comes in a licensed Enterprise Edition and a free Community edition, documentation can be found here.
Installation is done by installing the module:
Install-Module UniversalDashboard.Community -AcceptLicense
To test UD, run the following code
$MyDashboard = New-UDDashboard -Title "Hello, World" -Content {
New-UDCard -Title "Hello, my first universal dashboard!"
}
Start-UDDashboard -Port 10000 -Dashboard $MyDashboard -Name 'HelloDashboard'
Start a browser and enter URL: http://localhost:10000, this should show this:
Figure 2.
For a nice introduction in Universal Dashboard, please read this post by Nicolas Prigent.
Lately I have been busy writing some Windows PowerShell scripts for a vSphere environment. I noticed that there are some similarities between learning a spoken language and a programming language. In both cases you start by learning the grammar and vocabulary and develop your skills by a lot of practicing. But for both skills, when you have not used them for a while, the skills will fade.
Adventures in a Virtual World 