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This second part goes a little further than part 1. I could have went about this many ways, but I wanted to use Azure Resource Graph with a Logic App as why not eh?

So I created a dashboard in Azure from the queries I wrote and it looks something like this: –

So from the bottom part which says – Resources thats have No Tags I wanted to email a report to myself every x days.
So I created a Logic App which looks like this:-

Step 1 – is a recurrence trigger of x days
Step 2 – I call the manangement api which is -> https://management.azure.com/providers/Microsoft.ResourceGraph/resources?api-version=2019-04-01

With a JSON Payload like so:-

{
  "query": "Resources | join kind=leftouter (ResourceContainers | where type=='microsoft.resources/subscriptions' | project SubName=name, subscriptionId) on subscriptionId | mvexpand tags | extend tagKey = tostring(bag_keys(tags)[0]) | extend tagValue = tostring(tags[tagKey]) | where tagKey == '' and tagValue == '' | order by resourceGroup | project SubName, subscriptionId, name, ['Resource Type']=type, location, resourceGroup, tags",
  "subscriptions": [
    "subscription id goes here"
  ]
}

Step 3 – I then parse the JSON which looks like this:-

Step 4 – I use an initialize variable with the sample json returned from the API call in Step 2
Step 5 – I create an HTML Table which formats my results like so:-

Step 6 – I then send the email using whatever you like – I chose SendGrid and that looks like this:-

So every x days I get a report telling me whatever is in the Azure Resource Graph, formatted in an email.

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At work I needed to look and see if it was easy to figure out what resources have changed in Azure, in say the last day, week or month. Now there are multiple ways to do this but the one I like the most is using Azure Resource Graph (which I really like), that and some Kusto Query Language (KQL) and you can find out just about anything you want to about your resources. I’ve used Azure Resource Graph a lot and do workshops on it regularly, not sure why people dont use it more often tbh.

So if I want to see what has changed in a resource group in the last few days its a sample as reading this Microsoft web page: – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/governance/resource-graph/how-to/get-resource-changes.

From here we can start to think about the kinds fo queries of interest.

These include:-

• Show me all of the resources that have been created in the past 7 days.
• Show me the tags for all resources and group them by Tag.
• Show me all resources which havent been tagged.

This is the kind of things that interest me at the moment.

If we have a new subscription we can add a landing zone and add tagging by default to the subscription, the resource group, the resources etc, using Azure policy, which is all fine.

One other thing I like doing is adding a created date Tag to the resources on the day they were created incase I want to know this information at a later stage.

Lets get back to existing subscriptions where we cant add a landing zone for different reasons, I want to know which resources are tagged with a certain tag.

I found this really useful blog from some guy called John Klimster, who I have met in person and is a thoroughly nice chap and has a great blog!

If you’re interested the post I found particularly helpful for working in KQL and using Tags was this one from John.

I’m off to figure out what I need to do which will be hook my queries up to a Logic App and send a report via a schedule of some sort i reckon.

Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube Channel.

This December I’ll be 4 years into my Azure journey and the struggle is real.

Before going any further I am a very upbeat person, I love to have a laugh and wind people up, this isnt meant to sound like I am complaining, its more a personal story.

What do I mean by that? Well its a similar struggle for people starting out learning Azure.

Instead of where, and how do I get started (which is a common worry when starting out) I have thoughts like how do I stay relevant, what services should I keep an eye on, what areas should I go deep on?

I am what’s called a T-Shaped developer, think of the letter T – I have a breadth of knowledge and go deep in the dev space.

I never wanted to be the goto person in one area, thats just not me, I have always wanted to know something, about as much as I can, and therefor I pay a heavy price for that.

People who are experts in one area will tend to do better than the person who has a good knowledge across a lot of areas. Why do I think that, I just do, It’s hard to stand out as the goto person yeah, but if you are good at one thing then you can devote all of your energy to that one thing. I have a passion for learning and I can be like that forever.

So my struggle invloves, what should I learn?, I love working with Azure, its my primary focus area at this time. The thing to remember is technology changes, it evolves, the Cloud changes at speed. I keep an eye on trends ans I see where the trends are heading and If I am honest – not a huge fan of some of the latest technologies.

We seem to be making developing a solution a lot harder than it used to be, we seem to have black boxes which our code runs on which no one really fully understands. Maybe I am just old and need to get with the cool kids who knows.

So as you can see the struggle is real, keeping your skills up to date isnt too hard if you have the time and energy to do it. My struggle right now is deciding what technologies I want to learn, AI and Data, AKS, Machine Learning.

With Ignite coming in November I’m sure things might change and VNext is the next cool thing.

Anyways getting back to the main point, the struggle is real for all of us, not just the person getting started – we are all doing our best to stay relevant, to learn and help our customers.

Right now I am evaluting what I want to do next, I love my job and I am very lucky to work where I do. This is a personal choice I need to make and its a struggle figuring it all out.

What are you struggling with? – comment below.

Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube Channel.

I had 2 weeks off and plans fell through for the second week and so I have had some down time to figure out my next move. I’ve been searching for something of late and wasnt sure what it was and I know I have found what it was I needed.

Off the back of finding what I needed I am creating a To Don’t list so that I can check this regularly just to ensure I am on track, so here goes.

• Don’t consume Twitter, use it to post and leave it there.
• Same with LinkedIn, share content but dont spend time scrolling through it.
• Don’t purchase a book from Amazon, get half way through it and put it down for good.
• Don’t keep saying yes to every new project that people want me to work on, work on you’re own projects.
• Don’t spend time gathering resources for a project and then move onto the next thing because it might be a better idea.
• Don’t start the podcast back up and then let it slide again, I learned a lot from speaking to people all over the globe and it was a lot of fun.
• Don’t spend time blogging just for the sake of blogging.
• Don’t work on cool Azure projects at work and not blog about them either.
• Don’t do any more exams unless I need to know about the thing for work, you’ve done loads, concentrate on your other projects.

Ok so this was a very quick blog post to keep me in check. I will probably add to it as I go.

Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube Channel.

In this blog post we will cover how to deploy your Azure Function using Azure DevOps to try to get away from the right click publish way of deploying / or deploying straight from VS Code for example (ideally we want to run tests against our code). In my case I will be deploying a PowerShell Azure Function.

In Azure DevOps we have a new repo project which has our Azure Function code within a repository in Azure DevOps.

If we choose select Create Pipeline

We can then choose, Azure Repos Git like so:-

Then we need to select the Repo, next we select PowerShell Function App to Windows on Azure

Next we need to select the correct Azure Subscription, and then choose an existing Function App Name, then click Validate and configure.

So now we have a pipeline YAML file which will build and deploy your Azure PowerShell Function to Azure itself and the Yaml looks like the following:-

We can set our pipeline to build and deploy the code whenever any code changes are commited to the Azure Repo. As you can see highlighted above we do this by using a trigger: – master which means any commits to this branch will run the pipeline.

This is pretty simple stuff but its nice to know that Azure DevOps can tell from the repo that we have a PowerShell Azure Function and can create our yaml for us.

On March 4-5th I will be attending and speaking at the Ignite Tour, Zurich and will be talking about Deployment Practices for Greater Reliability as part of the Ops learning path.

Within the talk I will cover how to move toward a more reliable deployment of software and infrastructure as code, I’ll cover testing and talk about what good looks like and show some demo’s of what an up to date app deployment looks like using services like AKS and Azure Devops.

I have never been to Zurich and speaking at conferences was one of my goals for this year, I am really looking forward to seeing some friends during my trip and be able to present.

I have been using Presenter Coach which is built into PowerPoint if you use PowerPoint online and will record a quick demo of this if people think it would be worthhwile.

If you’re attending let me know and I will come and say hi, maybe even see you at my talk.

Any questions let me know in the comments below.