Building DevOps dashboard using SolarWinds and Opserver

It's been a long time since I've started using Opserver - a monitoring system by the team at Stack Exchange. Opserver gives you a great overview of what's going on with your company's infrastructure, I am still really amazed by it's simplicity and the feature set.

Unfortunately, there is no "wallboard" mode in it, which could be used to show most important metrics at a single screen. So today I'll show how to use OpServer as an API for SolarWinds, and build DevOps dashboards in minutes, simply by accessing existing classes.

Build artifacts viewer done right

Building deployment pipeline for the project usually involves integration of different systems which produce all kinds of "artifacts" - binaries, archives, images, etc.

In TeamCity, it usually looks like this:

Provisioning ASP.NET development environment - Chocolatey and internal file shares

When people hear the word "provisioning", they usually start thinking about creating virtual machines in the cloud, deployment with Sitecore PowerCore, etc. But it can be also applied to the developer workstations.

For example, for a typical ASP.NET application development, you'll need a machine with:

1. IIS and related OS features
2. Git, TortoiseSVN, etc.
3. SQL Server
4. Visual Studio (with extensions)

The first one is easy, you can manage windows features using PowerShell, read more about it here.

Typical script may look like this: