For the last couple of months members of the dbatools team have been working on a new PowerShell module called dbachecks. This open source PowerShell module will enable you to validate your SQL Instances. Today it is released for you all to start to use 🙂

Validate Your SQL Instances?

What do I mean by validate your SQL Instances? You want to know if your SQL Instances are (still) set up in the way that you want them to be or that you have not missed any configurations when setting them up. With dbachecks you can use any or all of the 80 checks to ensure one or many SQL Instances are as you want them to be. Using Pester, dbachecks will validate your SQL Instance(s) against default settings or ones that you configure yourself.

Installation

Installation is via the PowerShell Gallery. You will need to open PowerShell on a machine connected to the internet and run

Install-Module dbachecks

If you are not running your process as admin or you only want (or are able) to install for your own user account you will need to

Install-Module -Scope CurrentUser

This will also install the PSFramework module used for configuration (and other things beneath the hood) and the latest version (4.2.0 – released on Sunday!) of Pester

Once you have installed the module you can see the commands available by running

Get-Command -Module dbachecks

To be able to use these (and any PowerShell) commands, your first step should always be Get-Help

Get-Help Send-DbcMailMessage

80 Checks

At the time of release, dbachecks has 80 checks. You can see all of the checks by running

Get-DbcCheck

(Note this has nothing to do with DBCC CheckDb!) Here is the output of

Get-DbcCheck | Select Group, UniqueTag

so you can see the current checks

108 Configurations

One of the things I have been talking about in my presentation “Green is Good Red is Bad” is configuring Pester checks so that you do not have to keep writing new tests for the same thing but with different values.

For example, a different user for a database owner. The code to write the test for the database owner is the same but the value might be different for different applications, environments, clients, teams, domains etc. I gave a couple of different methods for achieving this.

With dbachecks we have made this much simpler enabling you to set configuration items at run-time or for your session and enabling you to export and import them so you can create different configs for different use cases

There are 108 configuration items at present. You can see the current configuration by running

Get-DbcConfig

which will show you the name of the config, the value it is currently set and the description

You can see all of the configs and their descriptions here

Running A Check

You can quickly run a single check by calling Invoke-DbcCheck.

Invoke-DbcCheck -SqlInstance localhost -Check FailedJob

Excellent, my agent jobs have not failed 🙂

Invoke-DbcCheck -SqlInstance localhost -Check LastGoodCheckDb

Thats good, all of my databases have had a successful DBCC CHECKDB within the last 7 days.

Setting a Configuration

To save me from having to specify the instance I want to run my tests against I can set the app.sqlinstance config to the instances I want to check.

Set-DbcConfig -Name app.sqlinstance -Value localhost, ’localhost\PROD1’

Then whenever I call Invoke-DbcCheck it will run against those instances for the SQL checks

So now if I run

Invoke-DbcCheck -Check LastDiffBackup

I can see that I dont have a diff backup for the databases on both instances. Better stop writing this and deal with that !!

The configurations are stored in the registry but you can export them and then import them for re-use easily. I have written another blog post about that.

The Show Parameter

Getting the results of the tests on the screen is cool but if you are running a lot of tests against a lot of instances then you might find that you have 3 failed tests out of 15000! This will mean a lot of scrolling through green text looking for the red text and you may find that your PowerShell buffer doesnt hold all of your test results leaving you very frustrated.

dbachecks supports the Pester Show parameter enabling you to filter the output of the results to the screen. The available values are Summary, None, Fails, Inconclusive, Passed, Pending and Skipped

in my opinion by far the most useful one is Fails as this will show you only the failed tests with the context to enable you to see which tests have failed

Invoke-DbcCheck -Check Agent -Show Fails

If we check all of the checks tagged as Agent we can easily see that most passed but The Job That Fails (surprisingly) failed. All of the other tests that were run for the agent service, operators, failsafe operator, database mail and all other agent jobs all passed in the example below

Test Results are for other People as well

It is all very well and good being able to run tests and get the results on our screen. It will be very useful for people to be able to validate a new SQL instance for example or run a morning check or the first step of an incident response. But test results are also useful for other people so we need to be able to share them

We have created a Power Bi Dashboard that comes with the dbachecks module to enable easy sharing of the test results. You can also send the results via email using Send-DbcMailMessage. we have an open issue for putting them into a database that we would love you to help resolve.

To get the results into PowerBi you can run

Invoke-DbcCheck -AllChecks -Show Fails -PassThru |Update-DbcPowerBiDataSource -Environment Production

This will run all of the dbachecks using your configuration for your Production environment, output only the failed tests to the screen and save the results in your windows\temp\dbachecks folder with a suffix of Production

If you then used a different configuration for your development environment and ran

Invoke-DbcCheck -AllChecks -Show Fails -PassThru |Update-DbcPowerBiDataSource -Environment Development

it will run all of the dbachecks using your configuration for your Development environment, output only the failed tests to the screen and save the results in your windows\temp\dbachecks folder with a suffix of Development and you would end up with two files in the folder

You can then simply run

Start-DbcPowerBi

and as long as you have the (free) Powerbi Desktop then you will see this. You will need to refresh the data to get your test results

Of course it is Powerbi so you can publish this report. Here it is so that you can click around and see what it looks like

It’s Open Source – We Want Your Ideas, Issues, New Code

dbachecks is open-source available on GitHub for anyone to contribute

We would love you to contribute. Please open issues for new tests, enhancements, bugs. Please fork the repository and add code to improve the module. please give feedback to make this module even more useful

You can also come in the SQL Server Community Slack and join the dbachecks channel and get advice, make comments or just join in the conversation

Further Reading

There are many more introduction blog posts covering different areas at

• dbachecks.io/install

Thank You

I want to say thank you to all of the people who have enabled dbachecks to get this far. These wonderful people have used their own time to ensure that you have a useful tool available to you for free

Chrissy Lemaire @cl

Fred Weinmann @FredWeinmann

Cláudio Silva @ClaudioESSilva

Stuart Moore @napalmgram

Shawn Melton @wsmelton

Garry Bargsley @gbargsley

Stephen Bennett @staggerlee011

Sander Stad @SQLStad

Jess Pomfret @jpomfret

Jason Squires @js0505

Shane O’Neill @SOZDBA

Tony Wilhelm @TonyWSQL

and all of the other people who have contributed in the dbachecks Slack channel