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I work as System Administrator for more than 15 years now and I love to make my life easier by automating work & personal stuff via PowerShell (even silly things like food recipes list generation).
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Recently I've noticed that it is not possible to run a scheduled task as an Azure AD user (AAD) with the enabled option 'run whether user is logged on or not'. No matter if you also enable 'do not store password...' option. The only way how you can r...
Or any other Azure service requiring special authentication strength
If you are using Azure Local (HCI), you might find the following PowerShell script AzureLocalVMImageUpdater.ps1 useful. What is it good for? The code replaces the Windows VM images in the specified Azure Local cluster(s) with the latest compatible ve...
Problem It happens that the hardware hash of your Autopilot device gets changed. Thanks to the replacement of the motherboard or some other issue. This can lead to future problems when your users need to reinstall the operating system, but the Autopi...
Learn how to use undocumented Azure APIs for massive performance gains
Keeping a secure, version-controlled backup of your Intune-managed device data, including BitLocker, LAPS, and FileVault keys, is a best practice for any modern IT team. In this post, I’ll guide you through an Azure DevOps pipeline that automates the...
Azure Automation Account has a handy feature to define (shared) Variables that can be used across all your Runbooks. What is not so nice at least for me was finding that complex objects like hashtables, arrays, psobjects, etc are stored as Newtonsoft.Json.Linq.JProperty
This makes retrieving the content of the variables quite unfriendly if you are not familiar with this Newtonsoft.Json.Linq.JProperty.
How to "solve" this? Save variables using old, and good Export-CliXML and then retrieve them using Import-CliXML 😉. If you do so, nothing will change for you when you try to work with the saved variable. The array will be still array, psobject will be still psobject, etc. But beware that you have to save the output of Export-CliXML as a string! Otherwise Azure will again use Newtonsoft.Json.Linq.JProperty to save the variable.
To make this easier I've created two proxy functions Set-AutomationVariable2 and Get-AutomationVariable2 (part of my AzureResourceStuff module).
To be able to use my functions, you need to import the module AzureResourceStuff to your Automation account. You can do it manually or use New-AzureAutomationModule (check this for more details)
New-AzureAutomationModule -moduleName 'AzureResourceStuff' -resourceGroupName <resourceGroupName> -automationAccountName <automationAccountName>
Create a new, empty variable of a string type that will be used to store our results.
To save the output to the Automation variable use the function Set-AutomationVariable2 like this
How the variable will look like:
To retrieve variable content and convert it back to the original object use the function Get-AutomationVariable2 like this
Don't forget you have to authenticate to Azure before working with Automation variables!
Connect-AzAccount -Identity