Is it possible to Discovery all Azure subscriptions with one schedule ?

[Mantautas]

Hello,

As a part of our Discovery process we are discovering Cloud Resources for Azure.

At the moment each Subscription has its own schedule (Screenshot). However we have more than 200+ Subscriptions on Azure.

Is it possible to discover all them using one schedule?

I don't want manually add 200+ schedules for each Azure subscription 🙂

Thank you,
Mantautas.

[Nestor Abad]

Hello,

From a technical perspective, you can setup discovery to iterate thought the Azure subscriptions in a single schedule. However, you might need to fine tune the process, depending on the amount of data and the security set-up in place and Mid-Servers configuration. 

I have seen cases where a whole public cloud subscriptions and discovered and populated on CMDB on a single schedule, but this can be effort intensive. 

Usually you configure a Service Principal to discover parent account, which should have access to the nested accounts (here).

So, while it is possible to do it, I would focus on the followings, before creating a single discovery schedule for all:

• How accurate and "fresh" does the data need to be? E.g. you might have CI's that require a less than 24h "refresh" for security, while some other devices might be ok with a weekly run.  If you rely on a single discovery for all CIs, you need to consider how recurrently will it be run. (e.g an organization wanted to run all cloud discovery on a single schedule, which was taking +10h. however, they had a security policy of max 6h since discovery for critical CI's, which was not achievable on a single schedule with ootb configurations. In the end, best approach was to split into 2 discovery schedules)

• How much workload will it bring? From a computing perspective, is worth considering how much data and processing are we going to be carried out. We can create a complete Discovery Schedule that collects all Azure data, but, most likely will require a more intensive computational peak effort that individual smaller discoveries (e.g by subnet, by availability zone, by subscription etc.). Consider this also for your own infrastructure, if you run lots of patterns and probes across many CI's at a similar time, this can also have a say on the network traffic in your availability zones. In the ServiceNow CMDB, since the incoming CIs data is processed and standardised before inserting it into the CMDB.

Hope it help, regards.

Nestor

[Mantautas]

Thank you @Nestor Abad , those are very useful insights.

We wont have scan every 24 hours, rather weekly is enough (Weekends).

You mentioned "from a technical perspective, you can setup discovery to iterate thought the Azure subscriptions in a single schedule". Can you please provide guidance on how this can be achieved in single schedule?

Thank you,

Mantautas Daunys.

[Mantautas]

Dear @Nestor Abad, would you be able provide solution on how achieve above?