I have created an ARM template for deploying resources into an Azure Resource Group. Is there any way I could use the same ARM template to perform automated "Baseline-Checks" in order to check if the resources have been changed in any way?
Are you just trying to determine if the state of the resources in Azure have "drifted" from the state declared in the template? If so you can use the what-if api and parse the results from that to see if something has changed.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/templates/deploy-what-if?tabs=azure-powershell
If you want to prevent drift from occurring, you can lock the resources to prevent changes.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/management/lock-resources?tabs=json
You can perform baseline checks by using ARM template but you need to
create individual template for each resource group in incremental
mode and when there is any changes in the resource it will
automatically updated in the template and by that way you can perform
baseline checks
Here is the documentation which helps in creating
ARM template.
Related
Exported Azure ARM template contains a lot's of useless information, let's say snapshots. I would like export actual resource definitions only.
Is it possible to filter unnecessary items out? I would like to convert this template to Bicep (to deploy all the resources into an another subscription) and now I have to clear manually all the unused items from the exported ARM template.
Thank you Gopa. Posting your suggestion as an answer to help other community members.
Exporting an ARM template from the resource group or resource will give you a template that is a snapshot of the current properties so it includes all the properties which were changed after the initial deployment.
You can also try exporting templates from the deployment history too which will give you an option to export your initial version without the changes you made after each deployment.
You can maintain all resources in source control as ARM templates and use CI/CD to deploy, whenever there is a change, so you can have our latest version of ARM templates and use it to build up a new environment when a need comes.
You can export the template that was used to deploy existing resources. The template you get is exactly the one that was used for deployment.
Export template after deployment
Select the resource group you want to export.
Select the link under Deployments.
Select one of the deployments from the deployment history.
Select Template. The template used for this deployment is displayed, and is available for download.
I am using Terraform to provision my Azure resources which works great, however, for some resources such as Logic Apps, doing this natively doesn't really work so I am using the Logic Apps ARM template and doing a Terraform "azurerm_resource_group_template_deployment" in order to provision. I know doing an ARM template deployment within Terraform is a bit of a last resort. It works ok though and deploys fine but I have a Service Bus connection defined and that is of type "securestring". By default, these are not saved as part of ARM deployment so everytime Terraform runs in my pipeline, even if the Logic App ARM template has not changed, it still does the deployment as the top level deployment state Terraform knows about previously did not have the value saved so will always see it as new. Is there any way around this other than changing the "securestring" to "string" which I obviously do not want to do given the endpoint contains the SAS key etc?
Hit same issues today - really limits what is viable. Managed to work around my two scenario's.
For things like keys and connection strings you can use the listkeys function inside of the ARM template - some examples here. I had this exact issue trying to get a log analytics workspace key in to the template - https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates/blob/master/demos/arm-template-retrieve-azure-storage-access-keys/azuredeploy.json - Get connection strings in ARM
Another scenario I had was wanting to pass a service principal secret from TF to template as securestring, to get around this I ended up getting the secret from keyvault inside of the ARM template instead.
I have a consomosDB in my azure account created by a script, I want to create an ARM template to manage the resource deployment by ARM template going forward, how can I make sure that ARM template doesn't recreate/overwrite the resource as it is the first time going to be deployed using ARM template?
ARM template willnot recreate/overwrite the existing resource, if the resource is specified in the template. It will update the resource if the property values for a resource are changed. See below extract from the official document.
Resource Manager tries to create all resources specified in the template. If the resource already exists in the resource group and its settings are unchanged, no operation is taken for that resource. If you change the property values for a resource, the resource is updated with those new values. If you try to update the location or type of an existing resource, the deployment fails with an error. Instead, deploy a new resource with the location or type that you need.
In complete mode, Resource Manager deletes resources that exist in the resource group but aren't specified in the template
If you don't specify certain properties, Resource Manager interprets the deployment as overwriting those values. Properties that aren't included in the template are reset to the default values. Specify all non-default values for the resource, not just the ones you're updating
So if you want the existing resource remain intact, you can export the resource template from Azure Portal to make sure all the properties are specified and not changed.
You can also lock the resource, set the lock level to CanNotDelete or ReadOnly to keep the resource from deleted or modified. Check document Lock resources to prevent unexpected changes for more information.
To modify existing resources using ARM templates, export the template for the resource from within the Azure Portal. Then download it locally. You can then modify it to update settings for Cosmos resources. ARM templates have api-versions. This will coincide with the underlying version in PS or CLI that you used to create the Cosmos account. When modifying the ARM template you will need to note the api-version and then refer to that version Cosmos DB schema reference to ensure the properties match the api-version in the template you deployed.
I have already installed my azure environment with a VM, a storage account and a data base server, and it works fine, but now i want to export the ARM template in order to automate the whole proccess to my customers. The problem is that when exporting this message shows up:
error
So the question is how do i export an ARM template correctly from Azure with all my resources without having to do much fixing my final template?
that is expected. some resource types cannot be exported. you'd have to take a look at the api definition and use that to export those (say at resources.azure.com)
Simple: use bicep. Azure Resource Manager's transpiler (it's a sweeter syntax that solves your needs)
In Bicep the directive you're looking for in your Azure Resource Manager "ARM" template is keyword "existing"
https://github.com/Azure/bicep/blob/main/docs/tutorial/05-loops-conditions-existing.md
keyword "existing" lets you reference a resource without a complete definition.
Otherwise you need to provide the entire ARM definition for the object.
Export failures per resource type occur when a given resource types schema is not available. We are looking into how we can autogenerate schemas for Azure resource providers and onboarding them to this new process, improving the overall success of the Export Template API.
I have an ARM template, which I will be using it to deploy resources (Mentioned as in Azure Portal) via Azure DevOps Pipeline. These ARM templates were created using my Dev Subscription. If I need to use this same ARM template to move to production, I need to manually update the subscription id etc in the ARM template and then run the respective pipelines. Is there any way to automate this manual updation process in ARM template.
I have tried using File Transform Agent job available under Azure DevOps Release pipeline. But since the values are available inside nested loops of ARM templates, it failed. Is there any PowerShell script that will be suitable for this process of updating values.
I don't want to manually update the ids under the ARM Template. Instead, I want to update it automatically.
Set Json Property task might help to set the property with specific value.
First in the marketplace search for "set Json property" task and install it for your organization.
Then you can set the property path and the value accordingly. check here for detail usage
Instead of hard coding in ARM templates you can use parameters file. For dev and prod you can have separate files and while deploying pass ARM Template along with parameter file whichever is required.
You can use AKV (Azure Key Vault) to access your subscription details in parameter file
subscription().subscriptionid will get you the details