Update Azure Active Directory Service Principal credentials

 Azure, Azure DevOps  1 Response »
Aug 302019
 

For some reason it’s not straight-forward to create new credentials for an existing Service Principal account in Azure Active Directory using PowerShell.

I’m using PowerShell, because I’m not an Azure AD admin in my current organization, but as a developer, I am able to create and manage service principal accounts. This is extremely convenient, because we use them for automated deployments to Azure.

We started using Azure DevOps release management about a year ago, and thus I recently encountered the first credential expiration of a service principal that was used by Azure DevOps to deploy resources to Azure. This makes sense, because service principal credential lifetime defaults to one year.

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Alerting when traffic manager endpoint is down

 Application Insights, Azure, Traffic Manager  No Responses »
Aug 092019
 

Azure has the capability to create alerts on all sorts of events. If it can be expressed as a metric on a resource in Azure, then you can get an alert if the metric value reaches a state you don’t like.

One of those metrics is the “Endpoint Status by Endpoint” of Azure Traffic Manager.

Traffic Manager has a number of backend endpoints to which it directs traffic. If an endpoint is down for some reason, it doesn’t get any traffic. This is part of what makes Traffic Manager smart.

But you probably want to know about it, when an endpoint is down. That is alerting on the “Endpoint Status by Endpoint” metric can do.

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Creating an X.509 Certificate Chain in C#

 .net, Azure, C#, Certificates, Device Provisioning Service, IoT Hub, Programming  4 Responses »
Apr 172018
 

I had some problems with the various PowerShell and bash samples in the Microsoft documentation on how to create a certificate chain for use with the Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service. Why did it have to be so complicated to get started with X.509 based authentication towards DPS?

What if I wrote my own program to create the root certificate, some intermediaries, and could also create device certificates? I set out to do that.

In the end, it turned out to be not that hard. .NET Core 2.0 has some new classes to help with certificate requests, so it isn’t necessary to call into native Windows libraries or use an extra library like BouncyCastle etc. Continue reading »

Using Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service to provision a device

 Azure, Device Provisioning Service, IoT Hub, Programming  No Responses »
Apr 092018
 
Internet of Things (CC BY 3.0 - https://www.iconfinder.com/samatodedara)

As you may have read, I made a previous blog post, which described how to create a Certificate Authority root certificate and a chain of intermediates using a Microsoft provided PowerShell sample.

In that post, I also showed how to create a Device Enrollment Group within the Device Provisioning Service (DPS). That’s all very nice, but the purpose of IoT Hub and the DPS is to connect devices. So let’s go ahead and do that.

First of all, the device needs its own certificate, which is trusted by the root CA certificate configured in the DPS device enrollment group.

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Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning with group enrollments

 Azure, Device Provisioning Service, IoT Hub  No Responses »
Apr 042018
 

When using group enrollments with the Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service (DPS), it is necessary with a X.509 certificate infrastructure.

At the very least, it is necessary to have a root Certificate Authority (Root CA) that can be used to sign device certificates.

The devices authenticate with the DPS using a device certificate which is signed by the root CA. That way, the DPS can verify that the device is allowed to connect to the DPS and be provisioned for communicating with the Azure IoT Hub.

It is better if the root CA is used to sign an intermediate CA certificate, which in turn can be used to sign the device certificates. Depending on the need, there can be a chain of intermediates.

The reason for the intermediate certificates is that it makes it easier to see who or what signed a device certificate. If it should become necessary to revoke the intermediate, only a subset of device certificates will stop functioning.

While it is possible to use a public CA as the root CA, it is not necessary. It is possible to create a root CA certificate on your own and use that for DPS. The whole area of X.509 certificates is complicated, so it may be a good idea to consult with professionals in the field before rolling your own CA.

This blog post is the first part of a series that will include C# code to create a certificate chain. The finished project also includes a sample showing how to let an IoT Hub device provision itself without factory-installed certificates or Hardware Security Module based tokens.

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TIL about Azure Resource Manager templates

 Application Insights, Azure, Programming  No Responses »
Sep 292017
 

I recently wanted to create an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template with a number of interdependent resources. This post contains a number of “Things I Learned”. Hopefully, you can avoid some of the problems I had.

The resources were:

  • SQL server and database
  • Azure function app
  • Azure web app for an ASP.NET Core site
  • Storage account
  • Application Insights instance for the web app
  • Application Insights instance for the function app

In my previous post I described a place to get detailed logs about Web App site extension installation. I had spent a long time to figure out the reason that the installation of the Application Insights site extension failed.

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Debugging Azure Web App ARM template deployment

 Azure  No Responses »
Sep 282017
 
Azure App Service - Web App

While trying to figure out a problem I had when using an ARM template to deploy a web app to Azure, I found a nice debug log that contains the full steps that the web app makes to install site extensions.

My problem is that the deployment fails while installing the Application Insights site extension. I haven’t found the solution yet, so if you have any tips, please feel free to reach out to me.
Update: I found the problem, and also a solution.
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Using Azure Application Insights to monitor a self-hosted WCF service – Part 2

 .net, Application Insights, Azure, Programming, WCF  1 Response »
Dec 082015
 

azureappinsightsIn the first part of this series I wrote about what Azure Application Insights (AI) can do and how to add extra information to the tracking telemetry your application sends to AI.

The solution that I wanted to add AI tracking to was a Windows Service with self-hosted WCF services. One service is the server side of a SOAP service where the caller defined the SOAP WSDL, and the other WCF service is a single method that receives raw XML as a http POST message. To track each request to the WCF service, I decided to use a message inspector.

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Setting up Visual Studio Online build.vnext to publish an Azure Cloud Service

 .net, Azure, Programming, Visual Studio Online  3 Responses »
Jun 232015
 

I have an Azure Cloud service which consists of web and worker roles. To make it quicker to update the cloud service whenever I’ve made changes to it, I want to deploy it from Visual Studio Online.

I already use VSO for source control for this project, and I have previously used the XAML based build process in VSO. Since I was going to move the project from one Azure account to another (from my play/test account to the business account), I decided to change the build process.

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Setting up an on-prem build agent for Visual Studio Online build

 .net, Azure, Programming, Visual Studio Online  No Responses »
Jun 192015
 

Visual Studio Online (VSO) has a new build system that will eventually replace the old XAML based system.

VSO now also lets you perform builds using an on-prem build agent (or one hosted in a VM on Azure etc.).

I haven not been able to find information about this, but I assume that using on-prem agents will not count against the VSO build minutes. I assume that running builds are “free” contrary to using hosted agents, where there are 60 minutes included in VSO, and then you have to pay for additional.

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