hands-on lab

Automating Infrastructure Health with Azure Automation Runbooks

Difficulty: Beginner
Duration: Up to 1 hour and 30 minutes
Students: 330
Rating: 4/5
Get guided in a real environmentPractice with a step-by-step scenario in a real, provisioned environment.
Learn and validateUse validations to check your solutions every step of the way.
See resultsTrack your knowledge and monitor your progress.

Description

Azure Automation is a service that offers the ability to automate almost any kind of resource management and administration across both your cloud and non-cloud environments. Among many other things, it can automate configuration and update management, task scheduling, problem remediation, and resource health, among both Windows and Linux environments, both in the cloud and on-premises. Companies use Azure Automation because it offers an intuitive way to automate almost any computing need.

Azure Automation runbooks are ways to store and execute pre-defined code, either on a schedule or in response to some kind of trigger. In this lab, you'll practice setting up a runbook to remediate a high CPU usage problem with an Azure VM.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this lab you will be able to:

  • Configure Metric Alerts in Azure to trigger Azure Automation Runbooks
  • Create and configure runbooks in the Azure Portal
  • Use runbooks to interact with other Azure resources

Intended Audience

This lab is intended for:

  • Azure administrators
  • Cloud engineers
  • Solutions architects and DevOps engineers
  • Anyone with a need to automate something in Azure or on-premises

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with:

  • Basic familiarity with the Azure Portal is helpful, but not required
  • Basic familiarity Windows Powershell is helpful but not required

Updates

August 5th, 2024 - Updated instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

January 11th, 2022 - Updated instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

Environment before

Environment after

Covered topics

Lab steps

Logging in to the Microsoft Azure Portal
Creating an Azure Automation Account
Configuring an Azure Automation Account Connection
Creating an Azure Automation Runbook
Configuring an Azure Automation Runbook to Restart an Azure VM
Creating an Azure Metric Alert to Trigger an Automation Runbook
Connecting to the Lab Provisioned Azure Virtual Machine
Triggering an Azure Metric Alert with Artificially High VM CPU Usage