Lack or reporting in DSC

DSC
1

Hello,

I set the following up in Azure Automation DSC, but hope you may be able to advise.

I have a simple configuration (as at the LAB stage) whereby I have DSC in Monitor & Apply mode for a Service. So when the Node (computer) falls out of compliance (the service is started) this is picked up and shows in Azure portal as node Not Compliant, OK so far.

The problem is that is about ‘all’ it really says, event if you Raw report which you can export from Azure to a text file. The report does not tell you ‘why’ it is not compliant for example it does not name the service or the face the service is stopped/running (depending on your config) etc. I am very surprised at this as these are the basics I was expecting from a report!

I figure I can get around this issue by using the built in ‘Script’ resource and writing WMI queries to check the service, then writing what every information I want to the Windows Event log. I can then parse these windows events to create my report. However I feel this should be unnecessary as the canned reports should provide the information in the first place.

Am I missing something? any advice please?

Thanks

CXMelga

 

2

My experience with Azure DSC is that it’ll report on a per-resource basis. How you name your resources in the MOF will influence how the reporting looks. But understand that the LCM itself doesn’t produce much more information than that. DSC itself doesn’t produce any reports; all of the reporting is what Azure DSC is parsing out of Get-DscConfiguration. You might, in fact, try just running Get-DscConfiguration against the node to see what the “raw” data says. Azure won’t be able to add anything that the raw data doesn’t contain.