Microsoft Azure Automation With Runbook

Microsoft Azure is an automation that simplifies your cloud management. Azure Automation allows you to automate the creation, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of your resources in your Azure environment and across external systems. Azure uses a highly scalable and reliable workflow execution engine to simplify your cloud management overhead. You can integrate with third party systems also in orchestrate. With Azure Automation we can connect in any system that exposes as APIs over internet protocols and we can integrate many Azure services like: WebApps management, Cloud Service management, VM management, storage management and SQL Server Management. Let's create our first runbook in Azure Automation Service. For that, you need to create a new Automation Service in Azure Portal



After creating Automation Service, Click on Runbooks and Add Runbook, give your runbook a name and select Runbook type – Graphical. You can also give a description of your runbook so that anyone who uses your runbook can understand what it's doing. Click on Create Button shown on below snap.



After the creation of the first runbook click on edit option, and graphical editor will open with left side toolbar.  In that write in search bar and pick Write-Output option and add to canvas. After adding in canvas click on that Write-Output and Property window will open on the right side and Label will be write-output; below that you can add some comments; also after that click on parameters.



One new window called Data Source will open for input objects . In Data Source select PowerShell Expression and in bottom Expression Window Write your message on “Your Message” and Click OK.



After adding input object in Write-OutPut you can Click on Save button, then click on Test Plane. In Test plane Click on Start button to run your Runbook and you can see the output of your runbook.



After successfully running the runbook you can publish that runbook by clicking on publish button.



After publishing your runbook, we can Schedule it also by clicking on Schedule button shown in the above snapshot. Once you click on Schedule button set the Date, Time, and Recurrence.



There is one more option called WebHook, so that you can start your runbook via a simple HTTP POST to a URL, for that click on WebHook, Create new WebHook and give name of WebHook and set expiration date and time for the same.