Downloading MP Wiki info

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As OpsMgr engineers we regularly check the Microsoft Management Pack Wiki for update info about Management Packs.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could that automated using PowerShell? For the System Center RAP as a Service (kind of Health Check for System Center) we check if the Premier Customer has installed the latest Management Packs in it’s environment. To manually check if there is a new Management Pack released is not the easiest task if you are responsible for maintaining this System Center Operations Manager RAP as as Service.

That’s why we created a PowerShell script that is scraping the MP Wiki website and returns all Management Pack as PowerShell objects. Now we can do some cool automation with that info. What about turning attached script into a module and use that from Azure Automation. Think about creating Tweets or Wunderlist tasks based on the info collected.

For the scraping we are using the Html Agility Pack which can be found on Codeplex. If you want to use this PowerShell function you first need to download the correct version of the Html Agility Pack and put it in a location where you can the Get-MPWikiManagementPack function.

Here is the script in action.

MPWiki

Steps:

  1. Download Html Agility Pack which can be found on Codeplex
  2. Download Get-MPWiki.ps1 script from my Github repo
  3. Place Get-MPWiki.ps1 and Html Agility files in same folder
  4. Open PowerShell
  5. Load Get-MPWiki.ps1 script dot sourced
  6. Run Get-MPWikiManagementPack function (make sure you run it from location where you install Html Agility Pack files.

Have fun!