Did You Know Azure Resource Graph Can Help Audit Resource Configuration Changes ?

Azure Resource Graph is an Azure service designed to extend Azure Resource Management capabilities. The following can be achieved using this service

• Query resources with complex filtering, grouping, and sorting by resource properties.
• Explore resources iteratively based on governance requirements.
• Assess the impact of applying policies in a vast cloud environment.
• Query changes made to resource properties (preview).

Apart from all the others, today’s focus is on monitoring resource configuration changes using Azure Resource Graph explorer

The latest release resource configuration changes enable queries across your subscriptions and tenant to discover changes to resources with Azure Resource Graph.

You can,

• Find when changes were detected on an Azure Resource Manager property
• See property change details for each resource change
• Query changes at scale across your subscriptions, management group, or tenant
• Audit, troubleshoot, and govern your resource changes at scale
• By using Azure Resource Graph to query your resource changes, you can craft charts and pin results to Azure dashboards based on specific change queries.

Few things to note –

• This feature is already enabled by default in all the tenants
• Retention for the data is set to 14 days by Microsoft

Let’s look at some of the examples

You can run the resource graph queries in

• Azure PowerShell
• Azure CLI
• Azure portal

Azure Resource Graph in Azure Portal

Login to Azure Portal and Search for Azure Resource Graph explorer

Once you select the Resource Graph Explorer, you will be presented with bunch of sample queries, similar to a log analytics workspace.

For us to see the resource changes I’m going to run the below query

resourcechanges 
| extend changeTime=todatetime(properties.changeAttributes.timestamp) 
| project changeTime, properties.changeType, properties.targetResourceId, properties.targetResourceType, properties.changes 
| order by changeTime desc

And I’m going to get all the changes that happened during the past 14 days. We can go into detail and understand what these changes and target resource details were

These details are helpful in terms of governance and audit perspective. Each change details include below information

• targetResourceId – The resourceID of the resource on which the change occurred.
• targetResourceType – The resource type of the resource on which the change occurred.
• changeType – Describes the type of change detected for the entire change record.
• changes – Dictionary of the resource properties (with property name as the key) that were updated as part of the change
• changeAttributes – Array of metadata related to the change

You can run the same query by using

Using Azure Powershell

Search-AzGraph -Query 'resourcechanges | extend changeTime=todatetime(properties.changeAttributes.timestamp) | project changeTime, properties.changeType, properties.targetResourceId, properties.targetResourceType, properties.changes | order by changeTime desc'

Using Azure CLI

az graph query -q 'resourcechanges | extend changeTime=todatetime(properties.changeAttributes.timestamp) | project changeTime, properties.changeType, properties.targetResourceId, properties.targetResourceType, properties.changes | order by changeTime desc

Also, apart from the governance and audit perspective, there are a bunch of other use cases for this free Microsoft service. Like

1. Resource Count
2. Resource dependencies
3. Resource search based on parameters
4. Etc…

Below are some other sample queries that you can use

All the deleted resources over the past 7 days

resourcechanges
| extend changeTime = todatetime(properties.changeAttributes.timestamp), targetResourceId = tostring(properties.targetResourceId),
changeType = tostring(properties.changeType), correlationId = properties.changeAttributes.correlationId
| where changeType == "Delete"
| order by changeTime desc
| project changeTime, resourceGroup, targetResourceId, changeType, correlationId

All the deleted resources over the past 7 days in a particular resource group

resourcechanges
| where resourceGroup == "ResourceGroup"
| extend changeTime = todatetime(properties.changeAttributes.timestamp), targetResourceId = tostring(properties.targetResourceId),
changeType = tostring(properties.changeType), correlationId = properties.changeAttributes.correlationId
| where changeType == "Delete"
| order by changeTime desc
| project changeTime, resourceGroup, targetResourceId, changeType, correlationId

For more about Azure resource graph and query usages, head out to the below Microsoft documentation

Azure Resource Graph documentation | Microsoft Docs

Until next time… 🙂