Azure Archives

Azure Lighthouse why is it so important

15/08/201915/08/2019
by Martin Ehrnst

Working for a Managed Service Provider (MSP) I have many times faced the challenges of managing multiple separate customers from one single pane. Weather it is multi tenant active directory, single AD or a vanilla Azure tenant. An MSP is only good when they can build tools to manage all customers in a streamlined fashion.

In the Microsoft sphere, partners and large enterprises have faced many of the same challenges. If you are a large enterprise, you might be eligible for an Enterprise Agreement.
As a partner you can apply to become a (tier 1) Cloud Solution Provider (CSP). The tools provided are are far from good enough. The challenge is that you are still bound to the tenant isolation. If you wanted to have a view of all alerts in Azure Monitor for all your customers. You need to create a tool that authenticate against each individual tenant and retrieve this information. Similar to what I did with SCOM.

Project Towboat

Last year I attended a side meeting for MSPs at Ignite. We discussed at scale management in the Azure Portal. We where promised that something called Project Towboat was planned. Since then it have been dead silent.
Out of the blue, Microsoft announced Azure Lighthouse. Promising simplified cross tenant resource management. So what makes this so great?

Delegated resource access

Azure Lighthouse uses delegated resource access. In essence, the customer establish a trust with your (managemen/master) tenant. This allows for the users in the management directory (tenant) to mange resources on behalf of their customers. Many uses Azure AD B2b to manage resources cross multiple tenants. With Azure Lighthouse, you can do that without changing the context of the user.

In my opinion. Here’s some of the features that make Azure Lighthouse a deal breaker.

Cross tenant monitoring in Azure

Azure Monitor is now multi tenant. As long as the resource group or subscription is available for the person using Azure Monitor. Application and infrastructure monitoring is available.

Multi tenant Log Analytics

Log Analytics is a part of Azure Monitor, and is called Azure Monitor Logs. The engine behind is Log Analytics. With Azure Lighthouse, Log Analytics have multi-tenancy capabilities, as it’s already able to query cross subscriptions. For example, activity logs can be connected directly, as if it was your own subscription.
The same applies to Azure storage accounts and virtual machines.

Azure security center for all customers

The beauty with delegated resource management just continues. Another great thing for your security team, apart from Log Analytics is Azure Security center is available in Azure Lighthouse. This means that the team (or that one person) can look at one single dashboard, or write the integration against one tenant.

Summary

With Azure Lighthouse greatly simplifies at scale and cross tenant management. Being tightly integrated with Azure Resource Manager for deployment, as well as Azure Monitor and Security Center for monitoring infrastructure and security.

I am really looking forward to create solutions and working more with Azure Lighthouse. It is a long awaited product, and with this launch, Microsoft is way ahead of it’s competitors.
Expect more dedicated posts on how to manage and automate using lighthouse in the future.

You can read more and find examples on the official Azure Lighthouse documentation and Azure Lighthouse github examples

Azure Monitor

Metric alerts for Azure monitor logs

12/06/201912/06/2019
by Martin Ehrnst

A common thing for traditional companies is to have one team responsible for monitoring. A few years ago, this team where close friends with the team provisioning infrastructure. Now, more and more companies are shifting to the “DevOps” world. Even Microsoft have killed SCOM and are only using Azure Monitor. Meaning that the one deployed the code (and the infrastructure) should be responsible for monitoring. In essence, this is great. But this transition takes time, and one should not underestimate the knowledge of the team who have been responsible for monitoring your entire infrastructure for decades.

If you are familiar with SCOM, you know that rules and monitors is targeted against a class of objects. IE, Windows 2016 operating system. When we move our workloads to Azure, we want to use Azure Monitor to monitor our workloads and VMs.

Enter Log alerts

Log Alerts has been around for quite some time and is commonly used to alert on actual log data. IE custom application logs, Windows event log and so on. But Log alerts has a “hidden” feature, especially for your monitoring teams, not wanting to manage hundreds of duplicate rules.

By using Log alerts with metric measurements you can almost replicate the what discoveries in SCOM does- find resources of a specific type, and attach some kind of monitoring to them. For example, you can create a search query for all your IaaS VMs and alert on their CPU counter.

This will let your monitoring team recreate all their logic, and have control over the entire infrastructure, almost as they had on-permises. At the same time you can leverage more DevOps practices and at the end have every team responsible for their own work.

Kusto examlpe

Below is a simple example that will list all VMs and their processor time. You can create an alert straight from Azure Monitor logs (former Log Analytics) or start from a new alert.

 Perf | where ObjectName == "Processor" and CounterName == "% Processor Time" | summarize AggregatedValue = avg(CounterValue) by bin(TimeGenerated, 5m), Computer

Summary

You have the option to monitor multiple VMs using one Alert Rule in Azure Monitor already. But one limitation is that this solution will not add new VMs to the alert rule. And for the time being, it only supports virtual machines
Log alerts are dependent on your query. So as long as your data is available, you can alert on it. Whether it is a web app, a SQL server or a custom log.

With Log Alerts, the transition to a public cloud-based infrastructure might be easier. Your operations teams can use their knowledge and re-create their on-premises monitoring logic as searches.
Application alerts could still be handled by the developers, and you can provision those using ARM templates or similar.

PS: I was going to write a longer post on how to manage and programmatically create log alerts, but with these great examples in Microsoft docs, there’s no need to re-invent the wheel.

Azure

Azure AD authentication in Azure Functions

28/03/201928/03/2019
by Martin Ehrnst

Ever had the need to enable Azure Active Directory authentication in Azure Functions? In a recent project I wanted to use Azure Functions, and I wanted both system-to-system authentication, as well as user based. As Azure Functions is a part of the app services in Azure. It share many of the same features. Authentication being one of them.

Enable authentication

The scope for this blog post is not to show you how to build an Azure function, but enable Azure AD authentication on it. You can add auth to your existing function or create a new one using your method of choice. For simplicity, I will show the process using the Azure portal.

To enable authentication in Azure Function. Navigate to “Authentication/authorization”. This wil open a series of blades which guides you through the process.

If your not familiar with Azure AD and custom application registrations, I recommend that you use the Express option. This will create the needed application in AAD for you.

Enable azure ad authentication in azure function

Change to anonymous authentication

By default Azure Function uses something called “Function authentication” This is where all your requests have a code parameter at the end of the URL.

https://my-function-app.azurewebsites.net/api/function-name?code=xyzx-zyxx...

We want to have Azure AD perform authentication and authorization, and not the function it self.

Within the GUI, its just a flick of a switch. If you are developing locally, using C# you typically do this:

 public static HttpResponseMessage (run
[HttpTrigger(
AuthorizationLevel.Anonymous)]
HttpRequestmessage request)
{
logic
}

Enable user assignment

After changing authorization level and enable AAD authentication, you can enable user assignment. You can skip this step if everyone in your organization shoul have access.

To enable user assignment. Navigate to enterprise application under AAD, and look up the app created by the wizard. The enterprise app is the service principal representing the application you created. Your Azure Function.

Under properties, find the swith for user assignment and turn it on. Navigate to your function URL and see if it works, meaning access denied.

Later add your own user and verify authentication works through Azure AD.

If you want other applications (clients) to call your function, you will have to assign them API access. The same way you give access to for example Microsoft Graph API, you will find your custom application as well.

But. This will not work right away. By default, there are no application roles assigned. Only delegated permissions. For client authentication to work, you will need to add custom roles to the app representing your Azure Function. It is not difficult, but I used too much time finding it out. Mocrosoft has it documented here

Authenticate with code

Chances are that your azure function is not a graphical website. Therefore I assume you want to authenticate using code. Either with your own user, or with a separate application/secret combination (app credentials).

The great thing about this is that it works just as any other Microsoft/Azure APIs. If you know how to get a token from Microsoft, you can use the same techniques against your function. My example below show how to retrieve a token for our azure function, and use that bearer token against the function. I use a client application in this scenario.

Summary

This feature is great. I consider my self as a modern IT operations guy. And operations role these days requires more coding and scripting. It is super easy to expose things on the internet. But remember, it might also be just as easy to secure.
I have no idea on how to implement a authentication layer. And if i can use one of the best, i’m all aboard.

Azure Monitor

Microsoft killed SCOM internally

11/03/201911/03/2019
by Martin Ehrnst

Microsoft no longer uses SCOM to monitor their own workloads. They have replaced their entire SCOM based monitoring stack with Azure Monitor. Allegedly reduced alert noise and administration overhead.

Even if I have moved from SCOM as my main responsibility, I am still very much involved in the whole monitoring and management scope. Over the last years we have heard alot of talk about Azure Monitor replacing SCOM, but that cooled off after a while, maybe until now?

Technology change or cultural change

Microsoft’s story on how they killed SCOM internally was released one day before the official announcement on Operations Manager 2019. But we first heard the story at Ignite in 2018. One may ask, why the re-initiate this topic now?
For SCOM 2019, the focus is to better support hybrid cloud environments, which is good. If Microsoft doesen’t want to use it, should you?

I have written and spoken about the use of SCOM as your hub for Azure Monitor, and my opinion hasn’t changed that much. I belive that transition to you a new monitoring stack will happen with changes to the infrastructure.

When you read the article you’ll see that this was the case for Microsoft as well. There are two quotes i find partculary interesting in the announcement.

“This is not just a technology change, but a culture change,” Baxter says. “It wasn’t only that we would remove SCOM central monitoring, but we had to tell our application teams, now you’re going to manage alerts..”

It was January of 2017 when Baxter got the call. “Our goal was not just to get rid of SCOM, but to move to a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution and retire Virtual Machine (VM) based infrastructure,” she says.

The key here is change in culture. Microsoft went full on DevOps for their internal IT, and by doing that technology will change, and your monitoring will follow.
Further, the showcase mention monitoring was desentralized, which is true. But ther’s another key part of this story. The monitoring team built an integration service between their monitoring stack (Azure Monitor, app insights) and their ITSM system. This system allows for more meta data on each alert etc before ending up as a ticket.

Final notes

If you’re organization runs most of your IaaS on premises, you don’t have to make change yet. Allow the culture to drive the change. A long the way, your SCOM environment can be that integration service between Azure PaaS, FaaS, XaaS and ITSM.

Automation

Using Azure pipelines to deploy ARM templates

27/02/201927/02/2019
by Martin Ehrnst

There’s many reasons that you would use an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template to deploy your Azure resources. And theres equally many ways to deploy this kind of template.

For simple one time deployments of Azure resources I tend to use PowerShell or AZ CLI, but lately I have ben busy trying to create a web api based on Azure Functions using C# and .NET core. For those who know me, that’s not straight foreward.
To make things even more diffucult, I wanted to use Azure DevOps and Pipelines to build and push my code. In order to do that, I had to have some infrastructure in place, so why wouldn’t I use Azure Pipelines to deploy the ARM template as well?

Create ARM template

In order to deploy Azure Resource Manager templates, you will need to create one. ARM templates are based on Json and follows a schema. This schema or rule set if you like, defines how you must structure your template.

There are two forms of deployment options. At a resource group level (most common) and subscription level deployment. Both uses the same kind of Json language but have two different schemas. You’ll find the current resource group deployment schema here (no need to read :))

If you are unfamiliar with Json and ARM templates I recommend you to read Microsofts official documentation and getting started guide which will show how you can find the template from an existing deploymen or create a new.

For reference, this is a simple template to deploy a web app, that I copied from Microsofts GitHub repo with a bunch of templates to get you started.

Adding ARM template along with your code

As I already mentioned deploy ARM template in a pipeline makes sense in many ways, especially if you have developed an application. This way you can control the infrastructure along side the code.

My Azure Function uses Cosmos DB and Key Vault as parts of it’s infrastructure. It is all developed in Visual Studio Code, and the whole thing is cutting edge for an old operations guy like me.

In the picture below you’ll see that I have structured my project in to two subfolders. One is holding the ARM templates, and the other one is for the acutal functions code. I did this so i would be able to chose artifacts from the build process in Azure DevOps pipelines. There might be a better way, but when i had everything in the same folder the templates was packed with the code and not available in deployment pipeline.

vscode function project with arm template folder

Set up the build pipeline

Not long ago I learned that there are two types of pipelines. Build pipelines and release pipelines. Build is used to pack up or actually build the application (same as pressing f5 in Visual Studio). Where release are used for pushing the application on to your infrastructure (and deploy the infra).

For reference. In Azure DevOps, my folder structure looks exactly the same

Next move over to pipelines and create a new release pipeline. From here chose your repository (I use Azure repos).

After chosing your repo, ou can chose to start from a template. My project is a .NET core application and I had no idea what was needed to build that, so a template worked nicely. Here you can chose what’s best for you’re project. The important pieces from an ARM template perspective comes in the next steps

Start out by filling in the obvious. A name and a server to do the build. In my case i run with Azure hosted 2017. In an on premises environment I would use private servers.

Add your templates as build artifacts

What you will need to do next is to take those Json files in your arm template catalog, and make them available as part of the build. You will have to add in a “Copy files” step and fill in a few properties. Pay attention to where I chose the source folder and the destination folder which have a variable reference, $(build.artifactstagingdirectory)/arm

Now. Hit save and queue. This will save your new (or edited pipeline) and start a build of your project.

By now you should also have a build running, and if you’re like me, exploring new stuff, you get used to this

In this particular error. The publish task for .NET core is missing www root folder. By trial and error I found that I had to make a few changes to my build pipeline. This is not a prerequisite for running ARM templates with Azure pipelines, but i figured I should add in everything I had to do for this project, both for my reference and for yours if needed.

I removed “publish web projects” as i don’t have an ordinary web project, but an Azure function based API.

When you remove this tick, the task will refere to your project file (.CSPROJ).

Here i should give a shout out to my trusty colleague Emil Kjelsrud for helping out, once again.

Hit save and queue once again. Voila!

Configure the release pipeline with ARM templates

When your build is successful, we’re close to launch our application on to Azure. We do that by configuring a release pipeline. It is possible to combine the two, but I like them separated.

Under Pipelines > Releases hit new. A new wizard will pop up. Either chose one that fit your purpose, or start from scratch. In my case I chose to start with app service deployment. One of the first things you notice is “some settings need attention.”

Required settings in this context are the connection to your Azure envirionment and subscription. You will need to configure this in order to continue. There are several methods available for connecting your pipelines to Azure. I have my pipeline deploying resources in a tenant and subscription that my user does not have access to. That configuration requires a SPN/App registration in Azure AD with the correct permissions.

After configuring your connection. Modify your pipeline by adding in your required Azure Resource Group Deployment tasks. Here comes a few important bits. Prior to setting up my pipeline, I have a resource group created already. If you want to have the resource group created during deployment. You can use the Azure CLI or Azure powershell tasks (or a template) to do so.

Continue to fill in the required parameters. Remember that I separated my application code and the templates in to separate folders? This is why. I can now chose from the same artifact what i want to deploy, as the build pipeline have them available in their respective folders. Chose the template and your parameters file.

In this Azure DevOps environment we have an extension available that parses all outputs from your ARM templates. This way I can use variables from the previous step in my app service deployment. If you dont have this extension available, you can achieve the same result using PowerShell

Create the release

You’re pipeline is now complete. Save and create a release, the pipeline should now pick up the latest build and deploy your code to Azure. You can follow the whole process in Azure, under resource group > deployment and in Azure DevOps

After a few minutes (or seconds) depending on your configuration, you should have both your infrastructure and the actual application available.

Final thoughts

While I understand many of the concepts around infrastructure as code, continious integration and so on, I don’t always use the correct terms, so thank you for reading.

I hope you also have a greater understanding around the concepts, and also how you can utilize the possibilities available. My thoughts working with projects like this is always bound to the operational side. I know I’m going to use more ARM templates in Azure Pipelines, but probably not along side the actual code, as that’s not my day-to-day work. Again, I see my self working more and more with these Dev tools, and thats why I like to say that this is how we do modern Ops.

I leared a few more tips and tricks during this small project, so expect a few more posts soon.

Azure Lighthouse why is it so important

Project Towboat

Delegated resource access

Cross tenant monitoring in Azure

Multi tenant Log Analytics

Azure security center for all customers

Summary

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Metric alerts for Azure monitor logs

Enter Log alerts

Kusto examlpe

Summary

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Azure AD authentication in Azure Functions

Enable authentication

Change to anonymous authentication

Enable user assignment

Authenticate with code

Summary

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Microsoft killed SCOM internally

Technology change or cultural change

Final notes

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Using Azure pipelines to deploy ARM templates

Create ARM template

Adding ARM template along with your code

Set up the build pipeline

Add your templates as build artifacts

Configure the release pipeline with ARM templates

Create the release

Final thoughts

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