Jenkins - User Interface for your Powershell tasks by Kirill Kravtsov

Jenkins is a tool that will help you to establish a simple, but incredibly functional User Interface for your Powershell code. It is designed to become a single point of entry for every member of your team, and allows you to hide the complexity of Powershell scripts behind a pretty web page.

Powershell is a perfect tool for all kind of scenarios, but very often, when a Powershell script should become a reliable and repeatable IT function (or, simply put, a scheduled job), people are struggling with choosing proper implementation: be it a Windows Scheduler task, a SQL Server Agent job, a script in a shared folder - and all of them seem to have the same exact deficiencies:

Obscurity: only people who implemented them actually know how and when the jobs are running
Logging: the output captured from the jobs is limited and troubleshooting is always a pain
Decentralization: the jobs are disorganized and kept in multiple different spots, complicating the administration.
Workarounds: many (if not all) of the schedulers require workarounds to start a properly parametrized Powershell script: a batch file, a call to powershell.exe with escaped parameter string and so on.

Luckily, there is a very simple yet incredibly functional tool that addresses all of those concerns: Jenkins.
Jenkins is a well known tool that is used for all kinds of automation. Jenkins is highly customizable and will take care of most of the common problems related to setting up jobs. It will ensure a simple yet effective way of scheduling any kind of tasks:

A simple web-interface to interact with all of your jobs
Folders and views to keep your jobs logically organized
Multiple cross-platform execution contexts controlled from a single point of entry
Integration with Source Control repositories - making sure that all of your jobs are using the latest code
Execution history, console output and log files - everything is obtainable within a few mouse clicks
… and many many more

This session will show in details how to:

Create your first Jenkins job that incorporates one or more Powershell tasks
Configure Jenkins agents to execute as different users
Parametrize your jobs to enable others to use the job without changing the code
Configure integration with Git that will download the fresh version of the code every time
Set up schedules and notifications
Check execution history and logs
Enhance your Jenkins experience by using Jenkins plugins

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