Zero-Touch BitLocker with PowerShell

7th of January, 2020 / / No Comments

The majority of IT engineers and architects traverse various forms of security on a daily basis ranging from our complex alphanumeric corporate logon passwords to the increasingly common MFA prompts on our mobiles. You could say that we have become experts in navigating modern security measures required to stay protected. But perhaps you’re not familiar in planning and rolling out that same security, at scale, to your organisation’s Windows laptops in the form of disk encryption.… [Keep reading] “Zero-Touch BitLocker with PowerShell”

Tag EBS Volumes with EC2 Instance Name

30th of July, 2019 / / No Comments

AWS environment, there is no automation process to update or create EC2 Server-Name Tags (ex: Tag{key}: Name  Tag{Value}:  ABCSRV001) into attached EBS volumes. The  “Name” tag has to be created manually in volumes.  This is an issue when try to identify  which ec2 instance is, or was, associated with the volume. You should use an Instance ID all the time to search the volume.

Also, this is an issue in CPM backups to identify snapshots due to missing “Name” Tag in EBS Volumes.… [Keep reading] “Tag EBS Volumes with EC2 Instance Name”

Using Ansible to create an inventory of your AWS resources

17th of April, 2019 / / No Comments

First published on Nivlesh’s personal blog at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com

Background

I was recently at a customer site, to perform an environment review of their AWS real-estate. As part of this engagement, I was going to do an inventory of all their AWS resources. Superficially, this sounds like an easy task, however when you consider the various regions that resources can be provisioned into, the amount of work required for a simple inventory can easily escalate.

Not being a big fan of manual work, I started to look at ways to automate this task.… [Keep reading] “Using Ansible to create an inventory of your AWS resources”

Automating Azure Instrumentation and Monitoring – Part 5: Log Alerts

25th of March, 2019 / / 1 Comment

In the previous part of this series, we looked at the basic structure of Azure Monitor alerts, and then specifically at metric alerts. In this part we will consider other types of alert that Azure Monitor can emit. We will first discuss application log alerts – sometimes simply called log alerts – which let us be notified about important data emitted into our application logs. Next we will discuss activity log alerts, which notify us when events happen within Azure itself.… [Keep reading] “Automating Azure Instrumentation and Monitoring – Part 5: Log Alerts”

Using Ansible to deploy an AWS environment

13th of March, 2019 / / No Comments

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com

Background

Over the past few weeks, I have been looking at various automation tools for AWS. One tool that seems to get a lot of limelight is Ansible, an open source automation tool from Red Hat. I decided to give it a go, and to my amazement, I was surprised at how easy it was to learn Ansible, and how powerful it can be.

All that one must do is to write up a list of tasks using YAML notation in a file (called a playbook) and get Ansible to execute it.… [Keep reading] “Using Ansible to deploy an AWS environment”

Automating Azure Instrumentation and Monitoring – Part 4: Metric Alerts

5th of February, 2019 / / No Comments

One of the most important features of Azure Monitor is its ability to send alerts when something interesting happens – in other words, when our telemetry meets some criteria we have told Azure Monitor that we’re interested in. We might have alerts that indicate when our application is down, or when it’s getting an unusually high amount of traffic, or when the response time or other performance metrics aren’t within the normal range. We can also have alerts based on the contents of log messages, and on the health status of Azure resources as reported by Azure itself.… [Keep reading] “Automating Azure Instrumentation and Monitoring – Part 4: Metric Alerts”

Azure Automation MS Flow Hybrid Workers SharePoint List upload CSV output

21st of January, 2019 / / 1 Comment

In this Blog I will discuss how to leverage SharePoint Lists as a front end using MS Flow to call Webhooks on Microsoft Azure Automation PowerShell scripts. These scripts execute via a hybrid worker to access On Premises resources. Results will be zipped and uploaded back to the SharePoint list.

Prerequisites

  • Azure Automation Subscription and Account
  • SharePoint Online / Site Collection
  • On-premises resource (Windows 2016 server) configured as Hybrid Worker
  • CredSSP needs to be enabled on hybrid Worker as Azure launches scripts as system account and some commands cannot use ‘-Credential’ )
  • Modules needed on Hybrid worker from elevated powershell run “Add-WindowsFeature RSAT-AD-PowerShell and “Install-Module SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline”
  • From Azure Import module from gallery SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline

Create SharePoint List

Create a SharePoint list as below this will be the input required for the script.… [Keep reading] “Azure Automation MS Flow Hybrid Workers SharePoint List upload CSV output”

Automating Azure Instrumentation and Monitoring – Part 3: Custom Metrics

16th of January, 2019 / / 1 Comment

One of the core data types that Azure Monitor works with is metrics – numerical pieces of data that represent the state of an Azure resource or of an application component at a specific point in time. Azure publishes built-in metrics for almost all Azure services, and these metrics are available for querying interactively as well as for use within alerts and other systems. In addition to the Azure-published metrics, we can also publish our own custom metrics.… [Keep reading] “Automating Azure Instrumentation and Monitoring – Part 3: Custom Metrics”

Retrieve Office 365 Audit logs using PowerShell and store in Azure table for quick retrieval

21st of December, 2018 / / 1 Comment

To create custom reports for Office 365 events, we could use the Audit logs from Security and Compliance center. The process is quite simple and could be implemented easily using PowerShell. In this blog, we will look at the steps for the same.

Later we will also see how we could store this data in a Azure Storage Table, so it is easy to fetch the data available.

Steps to fetch data from Office 365 Audit log using Exchange Online PowerShell

The first step in the process is to import the commands from Exchange online PowerShell.… [Keep reading] “Retrieve Office 365 Audit logs using PowerShell and store in Azure table for quick retrieval”

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”