During long running provisionings you may want to inform the user about the states you are currently processing. In my previous blog post I showed how to add a text to the ‘CurrentTask’. But maybe you want to give the user a little bit more information where the status field does not provide enough space. Especially in case of a provisioning failure you may want to give a more detailed explanation that just telling that the machine will be destroyed. With a few lines of PowerShell and the vCAC management context once more to the rescue you can achieve this easily:

# $m is the MgmtContext (repository)
PS > $m.GetType();

IsPublic IsSerial Name                                     BaseType
-------- -------- ----                                     --------
True     False    ManagementModelEntities                  DynamicOps.Repository.RepositoryServiceContext

# Create a new user log object
PS > $ul = New-Object DynamicOps.ManagementModel.UserLog;
PS > $ul.Type = [DynamicOps.ManagementModel.UserLogSeverity]::Info;
PS > $ul.Timestamp = [datetime]::Now;
PS > $ul.UserName = 'SHAREDOP\vcacservice';
PS > $ul.Message = "Hello, world!";
PS > $m.AddToUserLogs($ul);
PS > $m.SaveChanges();

Descriptor                        Headers                                                  StatusCode Error
----------                        -------                                                  ---------- -----
System.Data.Services.Client.En... {[DataServiceVersion, 1.0;], [...                               201
PS > $ul

UserLogId         : 1418
UserName          : SHAREDOP\vcacservice
Timestamp         : 11/3/2013 8:36:32 PM
Type              : 0
Message           : Hello, world!
ProvisioningGroup :

PS > $m.Detach($ul);

In case you wonder: yes, you can set the datetime to a future date and you can also delete log entries you no longer need. For exameple when you have maintainance on a vCenter cluster you could write a log entry to all affected users who have machines on that resource. Later on when normal service operation has been resumed you delete the old log entry and insert a new one with an updated message.

PS > $m.UserLogs |? UserLogId -eq 1234;

UserLogId         : 1234
UserName          : SHAREDOP\someEndUser
Timestamp         : 10/19/2013 11:27:06 AM
Type              : 0
Message           : Machine DUB100139: Memory Change, it is now [0] MB
ProvisioningGroup :

PS > $m.DeleteObject($ul)
PS > $m.SaveChanges()

Descriptor                        Headers                                                  StatusCode Error
----------                        -------                                                  ---------- -----
System.Data.Services.Client.En... {[DataServiceVersion, 1.0;], [...                               204