PowerShell is Microsoft's scripting language/shell that comes with Windows server and desktop per-installed nowadays. It has tight integration with the operating system and Microsoft's various server products. For automating tasks on Windows, it is a pretty compelling choice because of this bundling.

PowerShell runs on Windows only, so it is not a good choice in doing cross-platform metrics data gathering and scripting.

Below are scripts that should be scheduled as SQL Server Agent job steps to gather Windows server and SQL Server related metrics data.

• Windows server info gathering, assuming metrics database has been created and server Host table populated.
• Windows server disk metrics gathering
• SQL Server instance discovery
• SQL Server instance version/edition info and running status gathering
• SQL Server instance configuration gathering
• SQL Server instance performance counters gathering
• SQL Server database file metrics gathering
• SQL Server database table metrics gathering