What is Azure Inventory
Overview
The Azure Inventory extension scans Azure virtual machines within your organization's tenant for hardware and software inventory and imports this data as well as all Azure cloud resources into Matrix42 Enterprise Service Management.
This add-on can be installed from Matrix42 Extension Gallery.
Once it is installed, a new Azure Inventory data provider will be available under Administration > Integration > Data Providers.
Prerequisites
This extension is supported by Enterprise Service Management version 12.0.2.1231 and higher.
This extension requires that the Generic Inventory Data Provider add-on the Cloud Service add-on are installed as well. Both will be installed automatically when installing the Azure Inventory add-on.
The Cloud Service add-on is hidden in the Extension Gallery and currently is used only along with Azure Inventory and Azure Hybrid Benefit extensions.
In order to use the Azure Inventory data provider, you need to have the M42SoftwareAssetManagementForSaaS license certificate.
The ESM Platform subscription is the prerequisite to using the Azure Inventory add-on as it enables the usage of service connections.
To use this extension successfully, you will also need to configure the authorization settings on the Microsoft Azure portal and then create a service connection object in Matrix42 Enterprise Service Management.
How it works
- All virtual machines in the tenant are discovered through Azure API calls and imported into the Asset Management. For this step, the status of the virtual machines in Azure does not matter.
- The scan scripts for both operating systems, Windows and Linux, are uploaded into the configured Azure storage account.
- The scan process is triggered in an asynchronous way for every virtual machine that is online so that the scan processes more or less run in parallel on the virtual machines.
- The data provider monitors the configured result container in the Azure storage account, downloading incoming result files stored by the running scan scripts. The files are automatically deleted after the download. This data collection process lasts as long as the running scans continue to store their result files and terminates when there have not been arriving any new files for at least five minutes.
- All downloaded scan result files are imported into the inventory and asset data is updated.
- The data provider imports cloud resources with their tags and properties using the import definitions.