Azure Resource Graph

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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Get the List of All Azure VMs With All Their Private and Public IPs

Mihai Albert5 Comments

You want to retrieve a list with all your Azure VMs, complete with all their private and public IPs. You’d also like to get this fast, without having to start some script and come the next day to find the results (or worse, to discover that it errored out, and you only have 5 minutes left to produce the report). There are bits and pieces around the web – like this query that retrieves just one public IP per each VM – regardless if they have multiple assigned – but no private IP whatsoever. There are also Powershell scripts around, but they take too long or provide incomplete information.

And since Azure has, at this time, resources deployed using two possible models (ASM and ARM), you need to be careful about what you use to get each set of VMs, as the tools used to retrieve the info for one are incompatible with the other.

You might also want to query across thousands of VMs spread out in hundreds of Azure subscriptions that make up your tenant. How about a solution that takes less than a second to get all this information:

TL;DR Jump here to see how to extract all the Azure VMs + all their private/public IPs in a matter of seconds.

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