Automating Azure Instrumentation and Monitoring – Part 2: Application Insights

29th of November, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Application Insights is a component of Azure Monitor for application-level instrumentation. It collects telemetry from your application infrastructure like web servers, App Services, and Azure Functions apps, and from your application code. In this post we’ll discuss how Application Insights can be automated in several key ways: first, by setting up an Application Insights instance in an ARM template; second, by connecting it to various types of Azure application components through automation scripts including Azure Functions, App Services, and API Management; and third, by configuring its smart detection features to emit automatic alerts in a configurable way.… [Keep reading] “Automating Azure Instrumentation and Monitoring – Part 2: Application Insights”

Overcoming Issues Installing Azure Active Directory Connect

27th of November, 2018 / / No Comments

AzureADConnect

Having recently gone through the process of implementing a custom AADConnect staging installation for a large enterprise customer with more than 30,000 users, with a view to it serving as a fall back to an existing production AADConnect installation.

The requirement being to setup an Azure virtual machine running Windows 2016 Datacentre, AADConnect and SQL Server Standard 2017 (locally installed). Rather than SQL Express which comes by default but suffers limitations which preclude its use in large environments.… [Keep reading] “Overcoming Issues Installing Azure Active Directory Connect”

Nested Virtual PowerShell Desktop Environments on Windows 10 & Windows Server 2019 in Azure – Part 3

27th of November, 2018 / / No Comments

This is the third and likely last post in this series. In Part 1 I introduced the capability to have Virtual PowerShell Environments using Docker and the full Windows 10 / Server 2019 Build 1809 container images. In Part 2 I detailed remotely access the Azure RM Windows 10 / Server 2019 host that contains the Docker Container with our full Windows 1809 environment (and therefore PowerShell Desktop).

In this post I’ll detail building a Docker Image based off of the Windows 1809 Container image.… [Keep reading] “Nested Virtual PowerShell Desktop Environments on Windows 10 & Windows Server 2019 in Azure – Part 3”

Securing APIs through RBAC with Azure API management and Azure AD

26th of November, 2018 / / No Comments

One of Azure API Management great features is the ability to secure your APIs through policies, and thereby separating authorisation logic from your actual APIs. There’s plenty of guidance available on how to integrate Azure API management with Azure Active Directory or other OAuth providers, but very little information on how to apply fine grained access control on your APIs. Yes, it’s easy to setup OAuth to grant access to API consumers (authorisation grant) or machine to machine communication (client credentials grant).… [Keep reading] “Securing APIs through RBAC with Azure API management and Azure AD”

PnP Provisioning PowerShell, Site Scripts or CSOM scripts – which one to use and when?

23rd of November, 2018 / / No Comments

There are various approaches to plan and automate the process for Site creation and management of SharePoint Online Sites. In this blog we will look at these options and how to use with a best possible approach.

Pnp Provisioning PowerShell is a great way to automate creation of SharePoint assets through an xml or pnp template file using PowerShell. Similarly, Site scripts and site design allows us to create Site using JSON templates and also allows call to any Provisioning automation scripts or use a Template for custom implementation.… [Keep reading] “PnP Provisioning PowerShell, Site Scripts or CSOM scripts – which one to use and when?”

Searching & Returning all Objects/Users from a SailPoint IdentityNow Source

23rd of November, 2018 / / No Comments 
Update: Oct 2019. Searching Sources can be easily managed using the SailPoint IdentityNow PowerShell Module.

There are times when need to get an extract of all objects on an IdentityNow Source. Just a particular Source, not the object from the Identity Cube with attributes contributed from multiple sources.

I’ll cover how I do that in this post, which in turn also handles paging the results from IdentityNow as the SearchLimit is 2500 objects.

The basis of the logic is;

  • Define the Source to retrieve objects from
  • Define the number of results you wish to return per page (maximum is 2500)
  • Page results until you return the base object for all objects on the Source
  • Retrieve the Full Object details for each object

The Script

The following script has been written to run in VS Code and provide a Progress bar using the psInlineProgress PowerShell Module available from the PowerShell Gallery and here.… [Keep reading] “Searching & Returning all Objects/Users from a SailPoint IdentityNow Source”

Nested Virtual PowerShell Desktop Environments on Windows 10 & Windows Server 2019 in Azure – Part 2

22nd of November, 2018 / / 1 Comment 
27 Nov 18 Part 3 is available here that details customizing 
an image and accessing it via other SSH clients with elevated
access.

In Part-1 of this series posted yesterday I showed that with Windows 10/Windows Server 2019 we can now have isolated virtual environments for PowerShell Desktop in Azure through containerization.

In this post I’ll show how I plan to leverage this capability from a mobility perspective. What we need to do first is enable elevated (privileged) access to our VM.… [Keep reading] “Nested Virtual PowerShell Desktop Environments on Windows 10 & Windows Server 2019 in Azure – Part 2”

Nested Virtual PowerShell Desktop Environments on Windows 10 & Windows Server 2019 in Azure – Part 1

21st of November, 2018 / / 2 Comments 
22 Nov 18 Part 2 is available here that details accessing
the Docker Image via Azure Cloud Shell / SSH
27 Nov 18 Part 3 is available here that details customizing
an image and accessing it via other SSH clients with 
elevated access.

PowerShell Desktop Virtual Environments

If you’ve been working with PowerShell for any length of time you know that through its flexibility there can come challenges when using disparate PowerShell Modules and often their version dependencies.… [Keep reading] “Nested Virtual PowerShell Desktop Environments on Windows 10 & Windows Server 2019 in Azure – Part 1”

Retrieving SailPoint IdentityNow Certification Reports using PowerShell

20th of November, 2018 / / No Comments 
Update: Oct 2019. Certification Campaign Reports can be easily managed using the SailPoint IdentityNow PowerShell Module.

This is the third and probably last post in the Certifications by API series. The first post detailed retrieving and searching campaigns, the second post detailed creating and starting campaigns. If you haven’t read those, check them out as they will give you the background for this one.

As detailed in the previous two posts this post also assumes you are authenticated to IdentityNow as detailed in this post, and you understand that this post details accessing Certifications using the non-versioned SailPoint IdentityNow API’s.… [Keep reading] “Retrieving SailPoint IdentityNow Certification Reports using PowerShell”

Creating SailPoint IdentityNow Certification Campaigns using PowerShell

16th of November, 2018 / / No Comments 
Update: Oct 2019. Certification Campaigns can be easily managed using the SailPoint IdentityNow PowerShell Module.

This is the second post in the Certifications by API series. The last post detailed searching and retrieving campaigns. If you haven’t read that, check that out as it will give you the background for this one.

Also as per the last post this post also assumes you are authenticated to IdentityNow as detailed in this post, and you understand that this post details accessing Certifications using the non-versioned SailPoint IdentityNow API’s.… [Keep reading] “Creating SailPoint IdentityNow Certification Campaigns using PowerShell”