After reading the previous explanation, you may throw up your hands in frustration at the amount of work that needs to be done to view any useful information. The xDscDiagnostics PowerShell module provided by Microsoft directly addresses this frustration. It wraps many of the tasks into two cmdlets that can help you identify DSC events on both the local machine, as well as remotely against a target node. This is a great help in diagnosing and pinpointing issues with DSC.

For the purposes of this module, we will define a DSC operation as the set of events that describe a DSC execution from start to finish. For example, the events generated from Start-DSCConfiguration will be separate from those generated from Test-DSCConfiguration.