I spent most of my time in IT as a system admin, on the “Ops” side of DevOps. Over the years, I have accumulated many different batch files and scripts of one type or another. File shares worked well for storing the code I write. I discovered Git and it’s become my main repository for all script related code. Recently, I attempted to make a case to other admins for using Git, but failed to make a convincing case. Below, I lay out my case to why a sysadmin or anyone writing any kind of script should move to Git. I also outline how I use it in an effort to make my case and help anyone interested in getting started with Git.
Continue reading “Git for System Admin Scripting”
ARM Templates are written with JSON and are at the core of Azure Resource Manager deployments. I have used and developed templates for months. Although successful, I ran into issues with formatting and syntax this week and decided to take a step back and get a better understanding of the underlying JSON used in these templates. In this post, I start from the beginning, exploring JSON as it relates to ARM templates. 
Recently I ran into an issue with Authentication and Azure Automation child runbooks. The goal was to call a PowerShell child runbook following the documentation 
I see a lot of potential in Azure Log Analytics. That should go without saying considering the amount of time I have spent learning and documenting it over the past few weeks. One of the most exciting features that adds tremendous flexibility is the ability to log directly to Log Analytics with the Web API. Logging to the Web API enables anything to be written to Log Analytics without the use of the Microsoft Monitoring agent. 
Odds are, you were Googling something like ‘write event log PowerShell’ and you stumbled on this page. If that’s the case and you just want to write an event to the Event Log to test something like a monitoring or alerting app, I won’t disappoint, below is what you need to know. If you want a little more information on writing to the Event Log as part of a script, keep going.
As promised in my last post, here are the details on configuring Storage Spaces with Azure Desired State Configuration.