Green is Good Red is Bad - Turning your Checklists into Pester Tests - Rob Sewell
Channel: PowerShell Conference EU
Date: 2017-05-11

Relevant to any technicians who use checklists. Intro level and idea forming, getting people to look at the way they can use Pester
I was required to prove that I had successfully installed and configured a backup solution across a large estate. I had a number of success criteria that had to be met. Checking all of these by hand (eye) would have been error prone, so I wrote a test to do this for me and an easy for management to read HTML report using PowerShell and Pester. The session has come from that situation and is about enabling you to provide an easy to read output to quickly and repeatedly show that infrastructure is as expected for a set of checks. There are many use cases for this type of solution; DR testing, installation, first line checks, presentation setups
After this session you will have a basic understanding of how Pester works and the capability to examine your checklists and create your own validation tests and provide some reporting for management. You will pick up ideas of processes and checks that can be automated within your company I am able to perform the following checks in 15 minutes across hundreds of servers and thousands of databases and I think it is cool and useful and everyone should be able to do so and take the functionality to create their own. Every Job in Ola Hallengrens Maintenance Solution exists, is enabled, has a schedule, has succeeded, has 2 job steps, has a generate restore script job step, the root backup folder is contactable, for every database the correct folders exist for the full, differential and log backup depending on recovery model in that folder, that each of those backup folders has files in it, that the most recent file in each of those folders is less than the required frequency for those jobs.
Speaker: Rob Sewell

Slides and demo code for this and other sessions will be released on https://github.com/psconfeu/2017 over the next few weeks.