Another use for PowerShell and SQL

A few months ago I wrote a PowerShell script that looped through servers and databases  to save the properties inside an Excel spreadsheet (PowerShell and SQL). I thought it’s time to add another one.

One of the daily tasks I set up for myself as a SQL DBA is to go through the error logs for anything that may be an indicator of a problem. This is especially true on Sunday afternoons or Monday mornings, after my weekly DBCC CHECKDB job runs. I’ve configured the jobs to email me the results, but since I’m monitoring 10 instances they can be time consuming to read through. I usually just cut to the bottom, where DBCC reports the number of errors it finds. If the number of errors is 0, all is well and good. Otherwise, of course, further investigation is needed.

This seemed like a natural for a new PowerShell script. One of the great strengths of PowerShell is it’s ability to connect to as many remote servers as needed. And since I knew that the DBCC CHECKDB summary is written in the error log all I need to do is to read the logs. I had read this post by Buck Woody (blog | twitter) about doing almost exactly what I wanted to do. I merged his script with my earlier script and made a few other changes. My final code looks like this:

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName('Microsoft.SqlServer.SMO') | out-null 

#Get SQL account information
$credential = Get-Credential
$loginName = $credential.UserName -replace("\\","")  
$password = $credential.Password 

#Get variables
$logDate = read-host("Enter log date")
$searchPhrase = "*"
$searchPhrase += read-host("Enter search phrase")
$searchPhrase  += "*"
$srvlist = @(get-content "C:\Power\SQL_Servers.txt") 

#Loop through all instances 
foreach ($instance in $srvlist) 
{
  $instance
  $srv = New-Object ('Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server') $instance
  $srv.ConnectionContext.LoginSecure = $false
  $srv.ConnectionContext.set_Login($loginName)
  $srv.ConnectionContext.set_SecurePassword($password)         
  $srv.ReadErrorLog(0) | where {$_.LogDate -gt $logDate -and $_.Text -like $searchPhrase} 
}

Since I don’t always access the servers from a computer on the domain, I added login credentials. You can remove these if you want to use Windows authentication. After that I read a date and search phrase I type in. I found that this can come in handy when I want to change what I’m searching for. For instance, I can enter the phrase “DBCC CHECKDB” and the script will return the summaries based on the date I entered. Or I can search for “BACKUP” or “ERROR”, whatever my heart desires.