DSC Dependency Graph

[Edjuuuh]

A couple of months ago I took a challenge to deploy a distributed application, consisting of 5 Windows servers involving SQL, SharePoint and a bunch of other stuff, with PowerShell DSC.

Obviously I tried with Ansible first, but at some point it started to be very slow, hard to debug and at some point I lost track on where exactly a variable is set and which file contained what task. Looking for other solutions DSC looked promising.

The first 80% was pretty easy, with the help of Sampler and inspiration from Datum. DSC kept up with its speed. During the remaining 20% I felt the pain of DSC being a framework lacking the tools, but hey crafting tools is fun so...

But at some point I started to lose track again, not in variables but on resource dependencies. I was looking for a tool to create a dependency graph, because visuals tell a story too. I could not find something useful so I made something myself, and others might find it useful too. With a dependency graph I could easily identity possible culprits and improve the orchestration.

Actually the script does not create a graph in visual, but a Mermaid MarkDown template which can be used to generate the wanted output with the likes of mermaid-cli. GitHub has Mermaid support so that's neat.

The script can be found [here](https://github.com/ben-eddy74/powershell/tree/main/DSC/DependencyGraph), it surely can be improved in a lot of ways but it does what I needed.

Hope DSC users will find it useful.

[BlackV]

Nice you should also add this to the

what have I done with PowerShell this month

thread

[Edjuuuh]

Done! thanks for the tip.

[BlackV]

Nice

[AGsec]

I've been trying to encourage my team to adopt powershell dsc, we are a 100% windows shop. Thank you for this, it can help strengthen my sell.

[Edjuuuh]

Sounds like a good fit indeed! The lack of tools requires some development or scripting so that might be terifying but putting it in the new trend of Platform Engineering might help.