Tagging of resources in Azure can be a pain, especially if you have heaps of resources deployed. Tagging is used primarily for billing purposes and tags applied to the resource group are not inherited by the resources in that resource group. What’s more, if you want to chargeback Azure consumption to the business across various business units, tagging is the best way to do it.  There’s a few of ways you can chargeback to business units by using tags: Download or view your Azure billing invoice and daily usage data Connect to Microsoft Azure Enterprise with Power BI Cloudyn which has…

Here’s an example similar to my other Blog post Instant Monitoring of Windows Services. Instead, this blog demonstrates monitoring Performance Counters and using alerts to fire off a scheduled task. This scheduled task fires off a PowerShell script which in turn fires off an Azure Function, which in turn fires off an SMS text message and records an entry in a Log Analytics custom log. All this happens sequentially in the space of about 5 seconds. This blog demonstrates monitoring these 3 basic performance counters: Processor(_Total)\% Processor Time Memory\% Committed Bytes In Use LogicalDisk(C:)\% Free Space You could monitor more…

Has there been a seriously critical Windows Service which you need to monitor in real-time, or more than one Windows Service? – i.e. as soon as the Windows Service stops, you need to be notified by getting an SMS text message to your phone – within 5 seconds? While this is slightly manual, once setup, it works perfectly well and is reliable. This is similar to my other blog post which discusses Instant Monitoring of Windows Performance. This blog post walks you through everything, I am using both Azure Functions and the Telstra SMS API in Australia to send instant…

You can send practically any data to Azure Log Analytics (aka. OMS). As long as you can convert it to JSON format prior to sending it to your Log Analytics workspace. Here’s the official write up on it https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/log-analytics/log-analytics-data-collector-api. Data that you upload gets sent to a custom log, with the characters ‘_CL‘ at the end, these characters are appended automatically. This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters. Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters Show hidden characters #region…

An Azure blob SAS (Shared Access Signature) token is used in many places in order to access either a specific blob or a container. It’s simply a string made up of your storage account name and your storage account key. The whole point of the SAS token is that you can share it with anyone you like to give them access to blob storage without compromising your real underlining storage account key. The SAS token is in a format which can be used in a URI/URL. It is not a certificate and is not stored anywhere, it’s purely created/constructed and…

There’s a couple of ways to do DSC on Azure, you can deploy a template and use the DSC extension resource to deploy DSC configuration to your VM (simple for quick simple deployments), or you can leverage Azure Automation as a DSC Pull server (subject of this blog), where you store all your DSC configuration scripts, MOF files and manage all your DSC nodes, to see drift, compliance etc. This blog post discusses my github repo, which: Deploys an Azure VM Deploys a vNet into a separate Resource Group (Cross Resource Group Deployment), a resource group used for shared resources…

If you want to troubleshoot DSC (Desired State Configuration)… You can easily run a DSC config script locally on your computer, apply the MOF manually on-demand and watch it apply in realtime as per the below. The below are the lines of PowerShell code you need for testing. First though, make sure you run the entire DSC Configuration block of code – so it’s in memory, similar to how a function behaves. In the example below, my DSC configuration file is called ‘Main‘. This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below….

Grab data/information from anywhere and store this in Log Analytics. Basically any log, any OS, any type of data can be captured on a loop and sent to a Log Analytics workspace on a constant basis, then can be used to pull out reports etc. My example below pulls the ‘Current Playing Song‘ out of radio station websites, it runs through many radio stations, at the end converts the aggravated results to JSON, then the data is sent to the Custom Log in Log Analytics using the API. You can run the script below on a regular basis, e.g. set…