Azure VMs – Export to CSV

Abstract

For human race, there are some common tasks in daily life which you must do. Without which humans can survive but you can’t say if they are “living the life”. For example, taking a bath is one of such tasks. You can survive without taking a bath but you will not like it. These tasks are those which bring “life” to humans daily lives and make them enjoy their stay on earth.

Out of these humans there is special category of humans – I call them “Humans who work in Software field”. They can be sub-categorized into below –

       1.     Software developers
2.      IT administrators
3.      Project managers
4.      Software Engineers
5.      Solution Architects

For all these sub-categories you can apply prefix such as Senior, Junior, Principal, Full Stack, Distinguished and in recent times we have a new addition to this prefix known as “CLOUD”. These are humans who can easily survive without bath but there is one thing without which none of these humans can survive and it is known as “Export to CSV”. It is more or equally important like eating food and drinking water for them.

No matter how many cutting edge features and service Microsoft Azure is bringing, we still feel the product or service is not complete unless you offer “the” functionality of “Export to CSV”. Surprisingly Azure VM export to csv do not exists on Azure portal and you need to write a PowerShell for this. Therefore my lazy followers and friends asked me to write PowerShell to export Azure VM to CSV. So here we are!

Let’s go!

Current state of feedback

Users have provided the feedback to bring the functionality of export to csv for all azure resources on the portal. It is on the roadmap. You can view the details here - https://feedback.azure.com/forums/216843-virtual-machines/suggestions/37934101-virtual-machine-list-export-to-csv.

Why yet another new script?

I spoke to multiple people who are dealing with Azure VMs daily basis and requirements from there for CSV was an eye opener. Many of the scripts available today provides very minimal details about VM when exported to CSV. Most of the Azure Administrator find them not so useful. So after a quick survey with few of Lazy followers I received below list as a top ask for Azure VM to CSV export. In the below list the top ask was to retrieve Azure VNET for Azure VM and Azure VNET subnet for Azure VM using PowerShell. I have addressed this as well in the script.

So, current script provides the CSV output of Azure VMs with great details. Refer below columns list –

       1.      Subscription Id
2.      VM Name shown on the portal
3.      Resource group name
4.      Location
5.      VM Size
6.      Status of the VM
7.      Availability sets name [if present]
8.      Private IP assigned to primary NIC
9.      Public IP assigned to primary NIC
10.   OS type
11.   Primary NIC Name
12.   NSG name attached to Primary NIC
13.   VNET and Subnet name to which Azure VM belongs

So these are the “best 13” properties/ information from the Azure VM which everyone wants to have.

Get Tenant ID of Your Azure AD

Any Azure subscription always belong to an Azure AD. Any access control to Azure Subscription is controlled through Azure AD only. So when we need to login to Azure PowerShell for exporting Azure VMs list to CSV we need to specify the tenant id of Azure AD. You can record the Azure AD tenant id as shown in the portal below through Azure AD -> Properties.

Post this, to run the script install Azure PowerShell modules on your machine by following this link – here. If you have it already installed then you may skip it.

Provide Subscription ID and Tenant ID as input

Refer to below script. At this point either you can provide the subscription Id and if missing then script will prompt you for the subscription Id and Azure Ad tenant ID.

Get All Azure VMs and iterate to get best 13 properties

In this step we retrieve all azure VMs and iterate through each of the VM properties to get the above said Azure VM properties. Believe it was not easy! Glimpse of them is below!

Then I create array of all the properties and exported to CSV as shown below –

Bonus Tip

In the script I have commented an important line as below –

#Write-host "Disconnecting already cached accounts."

#Disconnect-AzAccount

If you are not getting correct Azure AD tenant and not able to find correct Azure subscriptions after login through PowerShell; uncomments it and then run the script. This command specifically removes all cached logins and make PowerShell kind of reset with Azure Logins. This should solve the problem, if you happen to face.

Also if you observe the script carefully, you can view how I used String functions of PowerShell to identify the VNET name of the azure VM. If you have programming eye, then you can use the same method to retrieve the “resource group” name of VNET in which the Azure VM is present.

Conclusion

And that’s it! Hope this article has given you how it is difficult to export Azure VMs details to CSV. Hope this PowerShell script has made your life simple.

Download the complete PowerShell code for exporting Azure VM to CSV from here –

https://github.com/kunalchandratre1/ExportAzureVMToCSV

Happy Exporting!!

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