As a customer of a cloud provider or even multiple providers, a company can quickly lose track of what exactly is happening there and what resources have actually been created there over time. In order not to lose the overview, this information should always be kept fresh. If necessary, a regular list is sufficient, if this is not already part of an automation with a dashboard. A dashboard displays large complex processes and states in a clear way.
Cloud providers refer to everything that an organization has activated in the cloud at some point and never deleted as a resource. In other words, these are “services made flesh”, such as virtual machines, storage accounts and many others.
Even smaller companies can quickly have several hundred resources in perhaps several clouds, many of which are just inactive and do not cause any costs. By the way, I always recommend setting up a fixed budget with a soft limit (email with warning) and a hard cap (stop) to prevent a cost explosion in case of misconfiguration or similar!
Cloud providers come with many ways to navigate their cloud, so I’ll just give an example of what I think makes sense, or what I think can be done with most environments.
In order to do the following, appropriate permissions are required.
Probably the easiest way is to nagigate to “All Resources” (“Browse All”) in the Azure dashboard (link).
Advantages:
You can get there via “all services”, then “resources”. A query can then be started there.
The simplest query would actually be to just show all resources: Azure Resources
Another query example would be to sort the resources by name:
Resources
| project name, type, location
| order by name asc
Advantages:
The PowerShell cloudshell has already loaded the AZ module, which provides a lot of cmdlets for the Azure cloud.
The simplest (formatted) example would then be:
Get-AzResource | ft
Sample output:
Name ResourceGroupName ResourceType Location
---- ----------------- ------------ --------
testVM testRG Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines westus
disk testRG Microsoft.Compute/disks westus
nic testRG Microsoft.Network/networkInterfaces westus
nsg testRG Microsoft.Network/networkSecurityGroups westus
ip testRG Microsoft.Network/publicIPAddresses westus
vnet testRG Microsoft.Network/virtualNetworks westus
testKV otherRG Microsoft.KeyVault/vaults eastus
storage otherResourceGroup Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts eastus
testVM2 otherResourceGroup Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines eastus
More information: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/az.resources/get-azresource
Advantages
In my opinion, the tag editor is very good for getting an overview of all resources.
The best way to do this is to select “All Regions” and “All Supported Resource Types” and click on “Search Resources”.
This will take a while and maybe some hints from FraudDetector will be displayed (ignore them this time), but after that you can even select the resources individually. The list is exportable.
Advantages: