Azure Automation Job Status

Sometimes you are using an Azure Automation to get things done using the Microsoft methods because you don’t have another choice. The problem when using N-Central is that you can’t monitor these Automations from within N-Central. For this purpose you need to logon to Azure and check the status of the runbook to get the result. It is much nicer to see in N-Central if a runbook has failed for some reason.

To be able to monitor such a job, we need the following data:

• Resource Group Name. This is the name of the resourcegroup in Azure, on which your job is linked to.
• Automation Account Name. This is the name of the Automation account the resource group is linked to.
• Runbook Name. This is the name of the runbook linked to the Automation Account specified above.

We will also need to have the app setup as explained in this post

Next we need to install a few specific versions of powershell modules, because of some bugs in later releases of these modules. To install these specific versions, execute the following lines of powershell

Uninstall-Module -name Az.Automation -AllVersions
Install-Module -Name Az.Automation -RequiredVersion 1.9.1
Install-Module -Name Az.Accounts -RequiredVersion 2.12.1

Now that we are setup, we can start by setting up some variables which hold our needed data:

$TenantID = "<TenantID>"
$ClientID = "<ClientID>"
$CertificateThumbprint = "<CertificateThumbprint>"
$ResourceGroupName = "<ResourcegroupName>"
$AutomationAccountName = "<AutomationAccountName>"
$RunbookName = "<RunbookName>"

We also need to setup some return variables with some default values. For easy of use, I have the type mentioned next to it

$Status = ""        #String
$LastRun = ""       #Date
$RunTime = 0       #Integer (Minutes)
$ErrorCount = 0    #Integer

Let’s check if we have all required data setup properly

if (($TenantID -match "<") -or ($ClientID -match "<") -or ($CertificateThumbprint -match "<") -or ($ResourceGroupName -match "<") -or ($AutomationAccountName -match "<") -or ($RunbookName -match "<"))
{
    $Status = "Failure, not all parameters are filled in correctly"
    Exit
}

Do a quick check of the required modules and import them

If (Get-Module -ListAvailable -Name AZ.Accounts)
{
    Import-Module AZ.Accounts
}
else
{
    $Status = "Please install the AZ.Accounts Powershell module on the executing server"
    Exit
}

If (Get-Module -ListAvailable -Name AZ.Automation)
{
    Import-Module AZ.Automation
}
else
{
    $Status = "Please install the AZ.Automation Powershell module on the executing server"
    Exit
}

Let’s connect to Azure and force using a TLS1.2 connection

[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12
Connect-AzAccount -ServicePrincipal -ApplicationId $ClientID -Tenant $TenantID -CertificateThumbprint $CertificateThumbprint

Now, let’s get the job data and make sure to only use the most recent run of the job

$Job = (Get-AzAutomationJob -ResourceGroupName $ResourceGroupName -AutomationAccountName $AutomationAccountName -RunbookName $RunbookName)[0]

We also want to get the Error stream of the most recent job, so that we can add the errorcount in the output if any error has been output

$JobErrors = (Get-AzAutomationJobOutput -Id $Job.JobId -ResourceGroupName $ResourceGroupName -AutomationAccountName $AutomationAccountName -stream "Error")

We no longer need a connection with Azure, so let’s disconnect it.

Disconnect-AzAccount

Our last step is to convert any data so that N-Central can interpret it correctly.

$Status = $Job.Status
$LastRun = $Job.StartTime.Date
if ($Status -eq "Running") {
    $RunTime = 0
    $Status += ", not Completed yet!"
}
else {
    $RunTime = [math]::Round(($Job.EndTime - $Job.StartTime).TotalMinutes)
}
$ErrorCount = $JobErrors.Count

In the snippet above, we check if the job has a Running status and if it does, we make sure to include the word Completed. That way we can use the Status result in N-Central to check if the word Completed is contained in the output and report a Normal state when the job is still not finished. This prevents a false positive if a job hasn’t finished yet.

To eliviate some stress on your server you are using to monitor these jobs, i have set it on a schedule to only check every hour and not every 5 minutes, but this ofcourse all deepends on your specific situation.

Downloads

Download AMP for direct import into N-Central: GitHub

Download PS1 file: GitHub