Azure Blob

Automate Retrieving Azure VM Data Using Azure Resource Graph (ARG) and C#

Mihai AlbertLeave a comment

In this post, we’ll look into using Azure Functions to run C# code. We’ll keep things simple, and we’ll only use a timer-based function. The function itself will simply write output data to a storage account, as a simple JSON file. The payload is something we’ve looked at before in detail: the list of all Azure VMs with all their private and public IPs.

Why go over the same thing that was discussed previously? First, we’ve used several methods to gather the data in that post (Powershell, Azure Resource Graph Explorer (ARGE), Azure CLI) but neither involved C#. Secondly, the methods depicted weren’t automation-ready, in the sense that one would still have to perform things manually to get the results (for Powershell, run the script; for Azure CLI, run the commands; for ARGE, run the query and manually export the results).

This time, C# code within an Azure Function will automatically write our output .json file, without any sort of manual intervention, via a timer-based trigger. The underlying technology to get all the networking data for the Azure VMs will be Azure Resource Graph (ARG).

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Use Microsoft Graph to Retrieve Users Photos and Store Them as Azure Blobs With C#

Mihai Albert2 Comments

A strange request comes your way. The photos of everyone in your organization’s Office 365 tenant need to be provided as .jpg files. They have to be imported into a proprietary app, and named based on an attribute that uniquely identifies to whom each belongs. It’s not clear yet if they just want all the photos as a giant .zip archive, or if their app runs in Azure and needs the photos stored in a storage account. You come across the Get-UserPhoto Powershell cmdlet, which seems to offer a quick solution, but it fails to deliver against those users that still have their mailbox on-premises. How to go about it?

TL;DR The sample code that retrieves photos from Office 365 and stores them both locally on disk, as well as in Azure Blob storage, can be found here.

The main goal of this post is to get users’ pictures from an Office 365 tenant. We’ll subsequently store them in 2 places: on disk and in an Azure storage account as block blobs. We’ll only target ‘live’ users, meaning those that have their account enabled and also have an employeeNumber. Our scenario further detailed:

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