Using the Azure REST API to Pause All AS Instances in a Resource Group

Forgetting to shutdown your Azure environments and burning through a month’s worth of Azure MSDN credit if you’re lucky (and racking up a large credit card charge if you’re not) is a pretty common experience these days. Some might even call it a right-of-passage (like running a DELETE statement in PROD and forgetting the WHERE-clause). Thankfully, Rui Romano shared a great blog post showing how to use the Azure REST API to Pause/Resume an Azure AS instance and schedule it via Azure Automation.

After having another close call last week with leaving an Azure AS environment running, I decided it was time to sit down and implement Rui’s solution. After getting Rui’s solution working (which didn’t take long at all as his instructions were very accurate) I decided to make a few minor adjustments…

• instead of a pause/resume for a single Azure AS instance, I wanted to simply pause ALL instances in a resource group
• added a check to see if the instance was already paused before attempting to pause it again (which causes an error)

The only real change is adding a REST call to retrieve all the servers in a resource group and capture the response in a variable…

#region get as-servers in ResourceGroup

    #URI TO GET SERVERS
    #GET /subscriptions/{subscriptionId}/resourceGroups/{resourceGroupName}/providers/Microsoft.AnalysisServices/servers?api-version=2016-05-16
    $requestUri_GetServerList = "https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/$SubscriptionId/resourceGroups/$resourceGroupName/providers/Microsoft.AnalysisServices/servers ?api-version=2016-05-16"
    
    $params = @{
        ContentType = 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'
        Headers = @{
        'authorization'="Bearer $($Token.access_token)"
        }
        Method = 'Get'
        URI = $requestUri_GetServerList
    }

    $resp = Invoke-RestMethod @params
    
#endregion 

Then we loop through the list of Azure AS instances in the response using a foreach loop…

foreach ( $svr in $resp.value ) 
{
    if ( $svr.type -eq "Microsoft.AnalysisServices/servers" )
    {
        $serverName = $svr.name
        Write-Output(">   Attempting to suspend: {1}" -f $serverName)

        #snip (see next code-block)            

    }
}

One other enhancement to Rui’s original script is to check to confirm the instance isn’t already paused before trying to pause it. As this is just for my personal lab/dev environment, a basic check like this works fine… however, in a client-production scenario, you’ll probably want to enhance this state check and add some re-try logic.

Here’s the complete foreach loop:

foreach ( $svr in $resp.value ) 
{
    if ( $svr.type -eq "Microsoft.AnalysisServices/servers" )
    {
        $serverName = $svr.name
        Write-Output(">   Attempting to suspend: {1}" -f $serverName)

            
        #URI TO GET STATE
        #GET /subscriptions/{subscriptionId}/resourceGroups/{resourceGroupName}/providers/Microsoft.AnalysisServices/servers/{serverName}?api-version=2016-05-16
        $requestUri_GetState = "https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/$SubscriptionId/resourceGroups/$resourceGroupName/providers/Microsoft.AnalysisServices/servers/$serverName ?api-version=2016-05-16"
    
        $params = @{
            ContentType = 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'
            Headers = @{
            'authorization'="Bearer $($Token.access_token)"
            }
            Method = 'Get'
            URI = $requestUri_GetState
        }

        $resp_state = Invoke-RestMethod @params

        if ( $resp_state.properties.state -eq "Paused" )
        {
            Write-Output ">      Server is already paused."
        }
        else 
        {

            $requestUri_Cmd = "https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/$SubscriptionId/resourceGroups/$resourceGroupName/providers/Microsoft.AnalysisServices/servers/$serverName/suspend ?api-version=2016-05-16"
    
            $params = @{
                ContentType = 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'
                Headers = @{
                'authorization'="Bearer $($Token.access_token)"
                }
                Method = 'Post'
                URI = $requestUri_Cmd
            }
    
            Invoke-RestMethod @params
    
        }
    }
}

I’m not posting the complete script, because I want you to read all of Rui’s post… and you’ll be glad you did as he also has the steps needed to setup the Azure Automation piece.