musc@> $daniele.rant | Out-Blog

It's friday night, I am quite tired and I can't be asked of writing a long post. But I have not written much all week, not even updated my Twitter, and now I want to finish the week with at least some goodies. So this is the turn of a couple of Powershell commands/snippets/scripts that will count alerts and events generated each day: this information could help you understand the trends of events and alerts over time in a Management Group. It is nothing fancy at all, but they can still be useful to someone out there. In the past (MOM 2005) I used to gather this kind of information with SQL Queries against the operations database. But now, with Powershell, everything is exposed as objects and it is much easier to get information without really getting your hands dirty with the database

#Number of Alerts per day

$alerttimes = Get-Alert | Select-Object TimeRaised
$array=@()

foreach ($datetime in $alerttimes){
$array += $datetime.timeraised.date
}

$array | Group-Object Date

#Number of Events per day

$eventtimes = Get-Event | Select-Object TimeGenerated
$array=@()

foreach ($datetime in $eventtimes){
$array += $datetime.timegenerated.date
}

$array | Group-Object Date

Beware that these "queries" might take a long time to execute (especially the events one) depending on the amount of data and your retention policy.

This is of course just scratching the surface of the amount of amazing things you can do with Powershell in Operations Manager 2007. For this kind of information you might want to keep an eye on the official "System Center Operations Manager Command Shell" blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/scshell/

A while ago, talking to some friends, I was mentioning how cool it was that Flickr provides APIs, so that you can always get your data out of it, if you want to. There are several downloader applications that I found on the Internet, but I have not yet chosen one that I completey like among the few that I've tried. So, inspired by Kosso's PHP script for enumerating your photos on Flickr, I thought I'd port it to Powershell and make my own version of it. Just for the fun of it. My Powershell script does not do everything that Kosso's one does: I don't build a web page showing description and comments. I suppose this is because the original script was made with PHP, which you usually run on a web server and outputting as HTML is the standard thing you would do in PHP. I just concentrated on the "download" thing, since mine it is a console script. You can think of mine as a "full backup" script. Full… well, at least of all your photos, if not of all the metadata. It should be trivial to extend anyway, also considering Powershell XML type accelerator really makes it extremely easy to parse the output of a REST API such as Flickr's (I would say even easier and more readable that PHP'simplexml). There is a ton of things that could be extended/improved in the script… including supporting proxy servers, accepting more parameters for things that are now hardcoded… and with a million other things. Even this way, though, I think that the script can be useful to show a number of techniques in Powershell. Or just to download your photos So you can download the script from here: Get-FlickrPhotos.ps1

I just read from Jeffrey Snover about this newly born Italian PowerShell community site.

I just created an account for myself on the site… as you know I like PowerShell, so even if I usually prefer writing stuff in english, I will try to hang out there and see how can I contribute to it.

After all, I am italian…