Crying Cloud

View Original

Capturing and using API queries from Azure in PowerShell with Fiddler

Similar New Content: Using Developer Tools to get the Payload to Create Azure Budget Alerts for Action Groups (New-AzConsumptionBudget) — Crying Cloud

This is a walkthrough for using Fiddler to capture traffic to Azure from a browser and writing and running that query in PowerShell.  I wrote this because I don't like posts that skip over a key step and explain the entire thing with a wave of the hand.  Although this article stands on it own, it is a key step in another series.

Install & Configure Fiddler

https://www.telerik.com/fiddler. We need to decrypt traffic from Azure.  Basically, you're letting Fiddler get in the middle of the conversation you're having with Azure and take a look at the traffic.  After installation select, Tools -> Options, select capture and decrypt HTTPS traffic.

You need to close and reopen Fiddler.  From the file menu, you can select start or stop, to capture internet traffic. Ensure capture is on and then refresh Azure page you want to query.  In this case, I want to capture data from the cost analysis page for a resource group.  This is easier when you close down most browser windows except the one you want to investigate.  You can also apply filters and capture limitations, but I'll let you figure that out.

Capture Your Query

I want to capture the cost for a resource group with daily totals so we can capture the cost over the month based on resource group tagging.  Browse to a resource group and select cost analysis with capture traffic.

The next part you'll just need to search through the queries and look for what you're after.  Select JSON in the response to see the data returned.

In the above results we can see the rows of cost data in the JSON response page, however, the other record in the row is the resource type, not the date.

This looks better, the columns JSON field shows the Cost, Date, and Currency and we can even see some rows with the right data, so we have the query. Now to create this in PowerShell.

Create Query in PowerShell

First, grab the header and then create a few parameters.  Note this is a POST command.

Raw Header

See this content in the original post

Converted

See this content in the original post

We need to create the JSON object that is passed with the POST. Shown above is what we need to recreate.

Select Raw and capture the text in the brackets. This will take a little bit of effort to convert into a PowerShell JSON object with variables.

  • commas , become semi colons ;

  • the { needs a @ in front of it @{

  • colons : need =

RAW

See this content in the original post

Converted

See this content in the original post

BearerToken

To access this data since we aren't logged in with PowerShell you need a bearer token.  Luckily someone has written a helpful query to capture the bearer token from your existing session. https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Easily-obtain-AccessToken-3ba6e593. 

See this content in the original post

If we include this function in our code and write a few more lines we are ready to start putting it all together. We create the headers sections, we use invoke-restmethod with POST we pass the body which must be converted with depth 100 otherwise data gets chopped out.

See this content in the original post

Final Script

See this content in the original post

Results

This shows the two output selected columns and rows

Good luck creating your own queries, I hope you found this helpful.

You can find another similar article by Microsoft here