Microsoft Azure offers a powerful suite of cloud services and features, but for novice users, it can be a daunting platform to navigate. With hundreds of different services, resources spread across subscriptions, and various related services offerings in different consoles, managing your Azure environment can be a significant challenge.
With Steampipe's relationship graphs for Azure, you can gain better visibility into your cloud infrastructure. Using both the Azure and AzureAD plugins, Steampipe's Azure Insights Mod provides dashboards with relational visualization of your cloud resources and how they are connected. This allows you to easily navigate and understand the relationships between users, subscriptions, and resources.
Let's take a closer look at some examples of how Steampipe relationship graphs can help you navigate and manage your Azure infrastructure more effectively.
VNET Dashboard
We can start with your Azure VNET. You can easily visualize this network and see how resources are connected. You can quickly identify that there is a WordPress instance in the public subnet, a MySQL server in a private subnet, and a SQL server in another private subnet. This information can help you troubleshoot issues more effectively, make informed decisions about resource allocation, and understand if there are any misconfigurations you were not expecting.
Compute VM
We can click on the WordPress VM to see more details about it. Here, Steampipe relationship graphs provide a detailed view of the resources connected to the VM. We can see that the WordPress instance has a disk and a network interface, which is connected to the public subnet of the VNET. Furthermore, we can see that there is a public IP address attached to the network interface, making it accessible from the internet.
Storage Account
When managing a storage account in Azure, it can be challenging to understand the relationships between storage containers and storage shares inside the same storage account. The Storage Account detail page will provide a singular view of the relationship between storage containers and storage shares inside the same storage account.
User Detail
Managing users and their access to Azure subscriptions and roles can be a complex task. Without clear visibility into these relationships, it can be difficult to ensure that your users have the right level of access to the resources they need.
Within the User Detail dashboard in Steampipe, you can easily see the relationship between a user, the subscriptions they have access to, and the roles assigned to that user. Relationship graphs provide a clear and intuitive visualization of these connections, making it easier to manage user access effectively.
For example, suppose you need to modify the access levels for a particular user. In that case, you can quickly identify which subscriptions the user has access to and which roles they are assigned. You can then make informed decisions about how to modify those access levels based on this information.
Uncover hidden details in your Azure footprint
These graphs work hand-in-hand with their dashboards' infocards, charts, and tables to help you understand Azure in a whole new way. Which of these seem most useful to you? What other kinds of relationships will help you understand your cloud environments and manage them more effectively?
We're excited to learn more about your experience using the Azure Insights Mod. Our Slack community is a great place to share your feedback and connect with other Steampipe & Azure users.