Lync 2013: Monitoring Mirrored SQL Databases With PowerShell

In Lync 2013 you are given a powerful new backend redundancy option for your important databases in the form of SQL mirroring. In this article I’ll discuss which services are able to be mirrored, the databases they encompass, and provide a PowerShell script to generate a report on the database mirror status. I also threw in Lync CMS replication and service status sections because it is the civil thing to do…

Gather Remote Event Logs With Powershell

About

Gather the remote event log information for one or more systems using wmi, alternate credentials, and multiple runspaces. Function supports custom timeout parameters in case of wmi problems and returns Event Log information for the specified number of past hours. You can view verbose information on each runspace thread in realtime with the -Verbose option.

Version History

1.0.0 – 10/16/2013

• Initial release

Notes

By default 24 hours is what we filter against for the results. I’m retroactively releasing this function individually from the new-assetreport project I’ve released a little while ago.

Retrieve Remote Scheduled Task Information With Powershell

This function uses multiple runspaces with along with COM objects to gather information about the scheduled tasks of remote systems. Getting this to work with alternate credentials may be possible but I wasn’t able to discern a usable method to make it happen so I resorted to PSremoting. What this means is that this script will work against multiple remote systems which do not have psremoting enabled as long as you are running the script with an account that has administrative rights to them. If you do pass a credential to the function then psremoting will be used instead. You can also force psremoting to be used if you are using that across the board in your environment.

Visualize Active Directory Site Connections

In this post I use powershell with graphviz to create an Active Directory diagram of all site connections between servers. Additionally, I’ve included some code which displays site connection options. You may be able to use this to find isolated DCs or just to see a pretty diagram.

Find Disabled Users With Lync Enabled Without Lync Cmdlts

Here is a quick tip which applies to more than just Lync. I use powershell with .NET ADSI to gather a list of all users which are disabled but still have Lync sip addresses assigned. There are numerous reasons to disable lync on such accounts. One reason would be to make certain that users whom are no longer with the organization get removed from the Lync address list. Another is so these same users can no longer access Lync! (Yes, a disabled AD account may still be authorized to access Lync).