Azure Logic Apps – Get Practical

Most patching dashboards are great for interactive views—but what if your stakeholders want a scheduled email that shows the current patch compliance for only a scoped set of servers (for example, those tagged for patch governance)? That’s where a small, reliable custom report shines.

In this post I’ll walk through the exact solution I built: a Logic App that queries Azure Update Manager data via Azure Resource Graph (ARG), filters to VMs tagged Monthly_Patch : yes, formats the results into a clean HTML email, and sends it on a monthly cadence.

Why a custom report?

No native email report: Azure Update Manager provides blades and workbooks, but not a ready-to-send, nicely formatted email.
Audience-specific scoping: We only want to report on VMs with a specific business tag (Monthly_Patch : yes).
Consistent sorting & formatting: Stakeholders wanted alphabetical order, readable timestamps, color-coded rows, and centered table content.
Lightweight & fast: With ARG we can query Update Manager resources directly—no Log Analytics workspace required for this report.

Continue reading “Automating a Monthly Azure Update Compliance Report with Logic Apps + Azure Resource Graph”

In today’s rapidly evolving IT landscape, automation is key to managing complex environments efficiently. Azure Logic Apps offers a powerful, low-code solution for automating workflows across a variety of services. One practical use case for Azure Logic Apps is automating the power management of Azure Virtual Machines (VMs), such as scheduling a VM to power on at a specific time. This can be particularly useful for managing development or testing environments, reducing costs by ensuring that VMs are not running when not needed. Here’s how you can automate the power-on process for an Azure VM using Logic Apps.

Prerequisites

Before we dive into the steps, ensure you have the following:

An Azure subscription.
An Azure Virtual Machine you want to automate.
Basic understanding of Azure Logic Apps.

Continue reading “How to Automate Azure Virtual Machine Power On Using Logic Apps”