The Surly Admin

Father, husband, IT Pro, cancer survivor

Active Directory Operational Testing

One of the things I’ve been working on lately is some kind of operational testing for Active Directory.  It’s such a reliable product that as Administrators we tend to neglect it.  Then Irwin Strachan came up with his Active Directory tests using Pester, and this was the first time I’d seen Pester used in something other than code testing and it really got the mind turning.  So when we started getting really serious about monthly capacity planning at athena health then I wanted to do this kind of testing for our Active Directory.

Continue reading →

Advertisement

November 28, 2016 Posted by | PowerShell | , , | Leave a comment

Calculating the Quarter

Quick post since it’s been awhile since I’ve done anything.  I’ve mentioned before but I do a lot of reports, and I recently got one to do some calculations for 95th percentile–well, kind of.  The funny thing was the person who asked me was supposed to be making a solution themselves, kind of homework from the boss but they didn’t mention it to me and I thought it would be a fun challenge so I went and wrote up a script that could do it, parameters and everything.   Oops!  Anyway, when done they loved the report so I streamlined it from taking 10 minutes to run to about 1 or 2 (all in SQL, no PowerShell) and thought I was done with it.  Then came the ask, not only do they want that data for the month, they want it for the whole quarter!  So now I had to figure out which quarter I was in and what the date range for that would be.  Yeah, I could put it in by hand, but there’s no challenge in that.

First came a Google to see if someone could do it in a one liner, and sure enough Vinoth over at StackOverflow had some great maths for that.  Now calculate the dates and the easiest way was to simply create a little loop 1 through 4 and calculate my dates:


#Define Quarters
$Quarters = @{}
$Start = Get-Date –Month 1 –Date 1 –Year (Get-Date).Year
ForEach ($Q in (1..4))
{
$Quarters.Add($Q,[PSCustomObject]@{
From = $Start
To = $Start.AddMonths(3).AddTicks(-1)
})
$Start = $Start.AddMonths(3)
}
#Define this quarter
$Quarter = [int]([math]::Ceiling((Get-Date –Format MM)/3))

view raw

Get-Quarter.ps1

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

First use Get-Date to get the January 1st, then loop 4 times adding 3 months each time to get the date ranges.  Now to get a date range for the current quarter?  $Quarters[$Quarter].

 

November 15, 2016 Posted by | PowerShell | , | 1 Comment