AzurePS – Get Practical

Streamlining Role Management in Azure AD with PowerShell and Microsoft Graph

In today’s rapidly evolving IT ecosystem, effective role management is key. This is especially true for large organisations where managing roles for individual users can quickly become overwhelming. For businesses that leverage Microsoft Azure, there are robust tools at hand that can dramatically simplify and automate these intricate tasks. Among these tools, PowerShell in conjunction with Microsoft Graph stands out for its administrative efficiency.

In this blog post, we’re going to guide you through the process of crafting a PowerShell script that utilises Microsoft Graph to identify a specific Azure AD group and remove all roles assigned directly to all group members. Let’s get started!

Preparations

Before we dive in, there are a few prerequisites to note. Firstly, ensure that you have the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK installed. If not, use the Install-Module -Name Microsoft.Graph command in your PowerShell to add it.

Next, establish a connection to Microsoft Graph by using the Connect-MgGraph cmdlet.

Finally, remember to tread carefully when modifying user permissions. Scripts that implement bulk changes can be particularly powerful, but also potentially disruptive if not properly managed. It’s always wise to run tests with a small number of users before applying changes across an entire group.

Continue reading “Streamlining Role Management in Azure AD with PowerShell and Microsoft Graph”

Azure – Unable to acquire token for tenant

In today’s post I will show a recurring problem that can happen when connecting to Azure through PowerShell when we already have a login history from other Azure’s tenants.

As soon as we try to log into Azure via PowerShell, we will get this error stating that an existing token from another subscription could not be acquired (Your access to that subscription may have been removed and the context is still present in the local files).

To clear the historic sessions context in PowerShell we have to execute the command “Clear-AzContext”

After running this command above, you can log in again and check that the error has been fixed and the history has been removed.

And that’s it folks, quick and practical post.
See you soon!

Joao Costa

Manage multiple Azure Contexts using PowerShell

PowerShell for Azure Databricks — Data Thirst

In my day-to-day work I have to deal with several customers and Azure Subscriptions, and for this reason it sometimes becomes exhausting to jump from one Azure Context to another, even when I want to switch to my personal Azure tenant to run some tests.

Today’s article will be short, but simple and useful. After all, I believe it can help in the organization and agility of those who need to manage several subscriptions like me.

Okay, let’s get straight to the point.

As you can see in the image above, once I authenticated an Azure context comes up as the default context.

Important -What is an Azure Context? Microsoft says “Azure contexts are PowerShell objects representing your active subscription to run commands against, and the authentication information needed to connect to an Azure cloud.”

Okay, we already noticed that when I authenticate with the user above, an Azure context is already loaded and so the next command will show which Azure contexts this same user has access to.

So let’s suppose I want to change which default subscription I want loaded once I authenticate to PowerShell.

Once you’ve changed the default context, you can check along the way: “C:\Users\Username\.Azure\AzureRmContext.json”

You can also rename all other subscriptions to a simpler name, and then you can select them more simply.

Rename-AzContext -SourceName ‘Visual Studio Professional (xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxx) xxx.xxx@xxx’ -TargetName ‘GP_Subscription’

And then when it is selected, you can use the new name placed

Select-AzContext ‘GP_Subscription’

Here we go, now you can choose your default context and also how to rename your context. You can also save these contexts like this when I did a few steps back and then when needed just import the context directly.

Import-AzContext “C:\Users\Username\.azure\CHANGENAME-context.json”

That’s all for today folks, see you soon.

Joao Costa

Creating Network Security Group using PowerShell

Hi folks!

Today let’s create the network security group that has a very important role within Microsoft Azure. It works at layer 4, where we can communicate ports and IPs between internal or external networks through a VPN.

Now let’s assign the following variables:

$NSGName=”NSG-VM-01″
$RGName= “RG_GETPRACTICAL”
$LOCATION= “UKSOUTH”

Next, we will create a variable with the name of the port and which rule will be used. In this case, I am creating an “NSG” for RDP access.

$RULES = New-AzNetworkSecurityRuleConfig -Name ‘Default-Allow-RDP’ -Direction Inbound -Priority 1000 -Access Allow -SourceAddressPrefix ‘*’ -SourcePortRange ‘*’ -DestinationAddressPrefix ‘*’ -DestinationPortRange 3389 -Protocol TCP

Now let’s create the NSG, using the following command.

$NSG = New-AzNetworkSecurityGroup -Name $NSGName -ResourceGroupName $RGName -Location $LOCATION -SecurityRules $RULES

Your NSG was successfully created.

Thanks guys and until the next post, where I will demonstrate how to create a virtual machine using all these commands at once.

Joao Paulo Costa

Creating Network Interface using PowerShell

Hey folks,

Continuing our series of articles on how to create resources in Azure using PowerShell, let’s talk about creating the network interface using PowerShell, creating the network interface and assigning it to a VM and associating it to a VNET is easier via shell command.

Now let’s assign some variables to create the network interface.

$RGName= “RG_GETPRACTICAL”
$NIC1=”Nic-GP-VM-01″
$LOCATION= “UKSouth”
$VNETNAME=”VNet-GETPRACTICAL”
$subnetIndex=0

This “SubnetIndex” variable is very important in the creation process, as it will identify each of your VNETs within your environment. In the case of this article I have a single VNET so I am considering the value “0”, but if you need to pull this value, just run a “Get-AzVirtualNetwork” with the add-ons such as resource group and VNET name.

Now let’s validate if the network exists within the environment.

$VNET=Get-AzVirtualNetwork -Name $VNETName -ResourceGroupName $RGName

Next we will create a public IP for the network interface.

$PIP=New-AzPublicIpAddress -Name $NIC1 -ResourceGroupName $RGName -Location $LOCATION -AllocationMethod Dynamic

Finally, we will create the network interface associating the public IP and the VNET that exists within our environment.

$NIC=New-AzNetworkInterface -Name $NIC1 -ResourceGroupName $RGName -Location $LOCATION -SubnetId $vnet.Subnets[$subnetIndex].Id -PublicIpAddressId $PIP.Id

Your network interface has now been successfully created.

Thanks guys and until the next post!

Joao Paulo Costa