Scripting In Large Environments

When I first started working in Azure running scripts was easy. I could easily do:

$subscriptions = Get-AZSubscription
foreach($subscription in $subscriptions)
{
    Select-AZSubscription $subscription
    ### Do Stuff

}

As I’ve gotten the opportunity to work with larger organizations these types of scripts become less efficient. With some clients having hundreds of subscriptions, this method can take a very long time when its not needed.

In comes Azure Resource Graph.

The Azure Resource Graph can be used to search for (almost) anything, however the documentation is sometimes hard to grasp. Here are the top few searches I have found the most useful.

Find the Network Interface by IP

This comes in handy when the network team finds a loud talking VM and they don’t have a good reverse DNS or method to look up by IP

Resources | where properties.ipConfigurations[0].properties.privateIPAddress == '10.100.100.50'

Now this won’t work if you have a Network Interface with secondary IPs, but I find that not super common.

VMs by OS type

I find this one to be helpful when working with clients to true-up their Hybrid Use Benefits.

Resources
| where type =~ 'Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines'
| summarize count() by tostring(properties.storageProfile.osDisk.osType)

Joins

To make queries human readable I generally do a inner join to show the subscription name instead of ID

Resources
| where type == 'microsoft.storage/storageaccounts'
| join kind = inner (ResourceContainers | where type=='microsoft.resources/subscriptions' | project SubscriptionName=name, subscriptionId) on subscriptionId
| project resourceGroup, name, SubscriptionName