Automation
Azure Automation allows you to automate the creation, monitoring, deployment, and maintenance of resources in your Azure environment using a highly-available workflow execution engine. Orchestrate time-consuming, error-prone, and frequently repeated tasks against Azure and third party systems to decrease time to value for your cloud operations.
Visit the Automation page to learn more about Automation and how to get started.
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az cli support in runbooks
az command cannot be found when using in a runbook
630 votesWe will be bringing in the Az CLI support to Azure Automation around CY22 Q2 timeframe.
The timelines got delayed due to the team working on other overarching priorities around bringing in more security related enhancements in Azure Automation. -
Utilize the same Automation hybrid runbook workers across multiple Automation accounts under the same subscription.
Utilize the same Automation hybrid runbook workers across multiple Automation accounts under the same subscription. Currently its a 1to1 link between an automation account and a runbook worker. This means I have to create a new runbook worker for each automation account.
387 votesPlanned for CY21 Q4 as part of Hybrid Extension (Arc enabled Automation).
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Provide more control of how runbooks are allocated to a sandbox
There are several scenarios that cause sandboxes to crash or runbooks to fail in both hybrid workers or in Azure.
1) Sandboxes fail with out of memory randomly. If the wrong combination of runbooks get executed in a sandbox the the sandbox can crash intermittently. If there was a way to control how many jobs run in a sandbox, or flag particular runbox to run by themselves and not share a runbook this problem could be mitigated.
2) If runbooks land in a sandbox that require different subscriptions one of the runbooks will fail. Someway of preventing this so that…361 votesFor #1 we suggest you use a hybrid worker that has larger limits than Automation sandboxes. For #2 you can use the -AzureRmContext parameter when using an Azure cmdlets in runbooks.
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Bring Azure Automation and DSC to Azure Stack
Please bring Azure Automation and DSC to on-premises to Azure Stack . This is an important part of the hybrid cloud story.
This is a copy from here: https://feedback.azure.com/forums/344565-azure-stack/suggestions/11632959-where-is-sma-in-microsoft-azure-stack .
285 votesThank you for this feedback. The hybrid story is very important to us, and we are working to bring new capabilities for you to utilize. Stay tuned.
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Redeploying jobSchedule resource from ARM template
Currently Microsoft.Automation/automationAccounts/jobSchedules resources cannot be redeployed from ARM template if there are existing jobSchedules pointing to the same runbook and schedule. The deployment would return:
"A job schedule for the specified runbook and schedule already exists"
Same issue even deploying with a different name (GUID) for the jobSchedule.
Currently the workaround is deleting the existing resource and redeploy, which is a very cumbersome approach for automation.
285 votesRedeploying job schedule through ARM template needs a different jobschedule GUID. Even if you delete the job schedule , the GUID is retained in the database , hence a 2nd deployment will succeed only if the GUID is different.
The scenarios where jobschedule GUID cannot be reused is as follows:
1) The automation account is deleted before deleting the job schedule. The job schedule entry is soft deleted but is still present in the database.
2) The automation account is created with the same name again and the same GUID is used for job schedule.
We have identified as a bug & an improvement task is planned. We will pick this up as resourcing allows since this would need some changes in the architecture. As a workaround to this, pls update the GUID for jobSchedule.
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Azure Automation PowerShell version 7.0
Anyone know if or when this will be released, or if it will be?
258 votesWe are working to bring in the support for Powershell 7.1 towards CY21 Q4 timeframe.
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Support PowerShell Core as Runbook Type
I develop on OSX and so use PowerShell Core heavily.
It's frustrating when Azure Automation Runbooks don't work the same way as they do locally because they run PowerShell 5.
For example, Invoke-RestMethod in PowerShell Core supports the following parameter:
-Authentication196 votesWork in progress to support PS7.1 by CY21 Q4
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Webhooks ARM Template
Webhooks from ARM Template still don't work.
I've seen the schema you're providing: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/templates/microsoft.automation/automationaccounts/webhooks
The PowerShell commandlets first request to generate a token before it is apply in the template.
When I run the ARM Template with your schema I cannot provide the URI and i get the error: "Invalid uri"I know it's a duplicate of https://feedback.azure.com/forums/246290-automation/suggestions/13227531-webhooks-arm-template
but you've closed the item and it is still not working.183 votesWe are working on this . The fix will support PUT scenario though Re-PUT/GET will not return the uri as before for security reasons. ETA would be Feb-End CY21.
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PowerShell cmdlet to get Runbook context.
It would be great if you could use in runbook code something like Get-RunbookContext to retrieve the current ResourceGroup and/or Automation Account the runbook is executing in. Then it would be much easier to locate Automation Account Assets like connections and variables without the need to hard-code them into your Runbook. The PowerShell commands available to retrieve and use assets require you to specify the ResourceGroup and Automation Account the asset is stored under.
137 votesThank you for contributing this idea. We are considering how this can be implemented in our future plans.
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Support a service tag which denotes the IP address space for Azure Automation
Currently, we don't support a service tag which denotes the IP address space for Azure Automation service. There are scenarios where a customer would like to allow only the inbound traffic from Azure Automation service by using NSG when a runbook send a HTTP request to a VM. Such customers are requires to whitelist all IP addresses of Azure datacenter. However the customers need to update the settings of NSG every week because there's a possibility that the Azure IP ranges are changed once a week. This requires complicated procedures and high-maintenance. So, it would be great if the service…
128 votesAzure Automation has a service tag support for hybrid jobs : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/automation/automation-hybrid-runbook-worker#service-tags . We are planning to bring in service tag support for cloud jobs too.
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Add support for Azure CLI Runbooks in Automation
This feature is requested at the below item, but it is closed to votes since it was moved from another product. Recreating so it can receive votes to reflect the frequent comments.
https://feedback.azure.com/forums/246290-automation/suggestions/31482895-add-support-to-automation-for-az-cliThe ask is to be able to create Runbooks that run Azure CLI commands, not PowerShell, as there is functionality in CLI that is not achieved with PowerShell in some cases.
127 votesFolks , we are tracking this feature request here :https://feedback.azure.com/forums/246290/suggestions/32547325 . Please use this link to upvote. We are planning to bring in this feature. Please share your use case to have Az CLI support in Automation runbooks for the product group to be able to plan it better with respect to the user experience.
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Add possibility to end a test job when it hangs.
Sometimes when running code in a PS runbook something seems to hang. I'm getting the following error although the job probably finished long time ago:
"BadRequest: Test job is already running."
I would like to have the opportunity to clear any running test jobs to bypass this bug.108 votesGreat feedback that is currently under review
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Increase 1MB Size Limit for DSC Node Configurations (MOF files)
Azure DSC node configuration (MOF files) are currently limited to 1 MB in size. This limitation does not allow for significantly detailed or complex configurations.
In my specific scenario, we have several IIS websites in a our web farm and we've hit the limit of how many unique websites we can configure per server because the MOF file is larger than 1 MB. The resulting error is that the MOF cannot be encrypted by Azure DSC Automation.
100 votesGreat feedback. We will consider this a bug to be addressed in the future.
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Ability to remove jobs from the Jobs history
The list of jobs quickly gets long and if you play around with some configurations etc and the job fails it will mess up the statistics (and potentially scare some people). So I suggest an option to remove jobs from that list.
88 votesThank you for the feedback. The product team has noted this suggestion and will bring in this feature as a job improvement.
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Make Automation an Azure Trusted Service
the Azure automation ip range should be added as an Azure trusted service so when I use vnet endpoints on storage accounts, etc and tell it to allow azure trusted services automation works.
86 votesAutomation service currently cannot be added as trusted service for storage due to inherent nature of the jobs which are untrusted customer code. We are looking into other options like Vnet Injections. The tentative ETA would be CY22.
Meanwhile customer can whitelist the automation backend IP’s in the storage firewall settings. There are 2 considerations with this approach:
1. The IP’s are subject to change, they don’t change too often but once changed customer will have to whitelist again.
2. The whitelisting will open up the storage account for any job running in the automation service. -
Change behavior when sandbox runs out of memory (1MB max to one stream limit)
There is currently a maximum limit of 1MB when outputting values to the any stream (Serialized size per object in pipeline).
I understand why this limit is there, but I don't think the current behavior is the right way to go.Current behavior is that the runbook restarts, and runs 3 times until it is stopped with the following error:
Suspended
The job action 'Activate' cannot be run, because the process stopped unexpectedly. The job action was attempted 3 times.If we run it on look at the eventlog on a hybrid worker (this error also happens in Azure workers),…
84 votesThanks for posting this feedback! I’m checking with our team to see if there is anything that we can do about this in the short term. We’ll definitely take this into consideration in our longer term plans.
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WebHook Job Monitoring
Allow people to use the same WebHook Url used for triggering a runbook for querying job status.
Instead of doing a HTTP POST (used for triggering) you could allow a HTTP GET with the JobId as parameter. This would be a lightweight alternative for consuming runbook results no matter client and platform.
Note: Using the same url means same access token which leads to monitoring being possible for the lifetime of the access token.78 votesThis is a great idea that we are continuing to review.
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DSC: Include nodes' Azure resource IDs
Currently, when viewing a node in Azure Automation DSC, the only identifying information is the node's hostname and IP address. If the node is an Azure VM, it would be helpful to also include the node's resource ID, because in a cloud environment hostnames and IPs can be constantly changing or even overlap.
Note that Azure VMs onboarded with the DSC extension already send resource ID and other "ExtendedProperties" to Azure Automation DSC, so this information is already being recorded, it's just for internal use only right now and can't be retrieved via the ARM API.
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PowerSTIG Module Import in Azure Automation
The PowerSTIG module is unable to be imported using the Azure Automation blade inside the Azure Portal. I would like to have the ability to import the PowerSTIG module and all required dependencies via the Azure Portal. Currently, to get this to work all required dependencies have to be imported using PowerShell.
73 votesReally good feedback, I passed this on to the Automation team to review and consider for future iterations to the service. Please stay tuned.
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Create an IP to report on DSC drifts / compliance
PowerShell DSC is currently poor in reporting on configuration drifts and compliance levels. Collect this data in Ops Insight to answer questions like:
- which systems are experiencing a configuration drifts and for which DSC policies?
- which is the compliance level for this specific DSC policy / setting?72 votesGreat feedback. We are looking at potentially delivering a solution in this area. Thank you!
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