Troubleshooting Common DSC Issues

Abstract

We’ve come a long way in our Desired State Configuration (DSC) journey. We started with what DSC is and moved all the way up to how to write custom DSC resources. By now, I assume that you have written some new custom DSC resources or at least attempted to write a few. Also, you might have started exploring where else you can deploy DSC and use it in your day-to-day job. Once you deploy and start to use any technology, it certainly requires a good amount of hands-on experience to troubleshoot issues that emerge in production or even during prototyping stages. It becomes complex when, to function, the technology in question depends on a set of other technologies or components. DSC is no exception. We’ve discussed how DSC uses WinRM and CIM as a foundation. Some of the DSC issues could arise because of the dependencies of these dependent technologies. In general, the DSC event logs and verbose messages from the resource execution provide details of what may be going wrong with the DSC configuration management. But that may not always be the case.