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).