Importing Data Into Beekeeper Patch Automation Software

When you enter data into Beekeeper Patching Automation, you use the UI to add server groups, Windows Failover Clusters, and Exchange DAGs.  Then, you assign validation tasks to these server groups or clusters.  To create the execution job, you assign the server groups or clusters to a schedule.  This can be time consuming.

I have created PowerShell scripts to do these tasks.  In a series of blog posts, I will share these PowerShell scripts and go over their usage.

The first PowerShell script will export servers from an SCCM collection into a CSV.  Then another script will import that CSV to create the appropriate Application groups, Windows Failover Clusters, or Exchange DAGs.

Special Note: When you are adding Windows Failover Clusters and Exchange DAGs, you specify the cluster or DAG name, not the individual nodes.

To export the members of an SCCM collection, you will need to provide the SCCM collection ID and the path to the exported CSV.  To get your SCCM collection ID, you can add that field to the view of your collections by right-clicking the column names, and adding Collection ID with the SCCM console.

You can run ExportSCCMCollection.ps1 (download here from Github) and it prompts you for the parameters if you do not specify them. Make sure you run this script where you have the SCCM console installed so that the PowerShell snapin is available. Specify the full path for the CSV file.

The script statically sets some of the fields, which you can edit:

Example CSV file:

Another source for importing servers into Beekeeper can be your asset management database. 

Using ExportServersFromSQLToCSV.ps1, you can customize the database source and export the appropriate servers using a SQL query.

This script requires the full patch for the output CSV as a parameter.

Now that we have the exported data, we can import that data using another PowerShell script, ImportCSVToBeekeeper.ps1.  This script is configured to be run on the Beekeeper server, you can run it from anywhere if you change all references to “localhost” to the Beekeeper server name.  You need to specify the full path to the CSV file when executing the script.

In Beekeeper, the Application Group has been created:

Obviously, this will help you when adding many servers at once.

An example CSV is also in the github repository.

There will be three more blog posts in this series:

• Import schedules and assign them to Application Groups, Windows Failover Clusters, or Exchange DAGs
• Import Validation Tasks into Beekeeper
• Associate Validation Tasks to Application Groups, Windows Failover Clusters, or Exchange DAGs