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Jun 8, 2022    |      0 comments

How to update Azure DevOps Service Principal connection once expired

When you use Azure DevOps to deploy your projects you can connect it to Azure via different methods. The most convenient type of service connection is `Azure Resource Manager using service principal authentication`.

This type of connection creates application in your Azure Active Directory which is used as a Service Principal. Then for this application secret is generated, so Azure DevOps can connect to Azure. This secret token is expiring from time to time. The default time to live is 2 years but it may vary.

Once the secret is expired you will get this type of error when trying to deploy your code to Azure:

##[error]Error: Failed to get resource ID for resource type 'Microsoft.Web/Sites' and resource name 'XXX'. Error: Could not fetch access token for Azure. Verify if the Service Principal used is valid and not expired. For more information refer https://aka.ms/azureappservicedeploytsg
Error during deployment once secret for Service Principal expired.
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Mar 9, 2022    |      0 comments

Setup Grafana email notification via SendGrid SMTP (also for Bitnami Grafana)

Setup API Key on SendGrid

  1. Go to your SendGrid account and go to API Keys section.
  2. Add new API Key with, at least, Mail Send permission.
  3. Copy generated API Key. Your key should start with SG.

Grafana setup

  1. You have to edit Grafana configuration. Refer to Grafana Configuration documentation on where to find your config file. For Bitnami Grafana distribution you can find it here: /opt/bitnami/grafana/conf/grafana.ini
  2. Look for [smtp] section and either update existing one or add new one
[smtp]
enabled = true
host = smtp.sendgrid.net:587
user = apikey
password = YOUR_SENDGRID_API_KEY
skip_verify = false
from_address = admin@grafana.localhost
from_name = Grafana

3. Restart Grafana: official documentation, Bitnami documentation.

Testing

  1. Go to Alert notification channels (/alerting/notifications)
  2. Create new channel with type email.
  3. Add email address
  4. Hit Test
  5. You should receive test notification sent by Grafana through SendGrid SMTP sevice!

Few remarks

enabled = true – by default it’s false and then SMTP is disabled.

smtp.sendgrid.net:587 – you can try different ports but this one is recommended by SendGrid here Integrating with the SMTP API.

user – you have to provide apikey as user, otherwise you will end up with 550 Unauthenticated senders not allowed.

skip_verify – in other SMTP servers you may have to set this to true, yet for SendGrid it will cause problems as described in Notification channel Email cannot integrate with Sendgrid.

from_adress – looks like you can put anything you want but I would recommend to put verified email address you have in SendGrid – check the Sender Authentication section.

Links

Grafana configuration reference

550 Unauthenticated senders not allowed error code description.

Integrating with the SMTP API

Feb 18, 2022    |      0 comments

Azure Log Analytics / Application Insights – search everywhere

If you have Azure Log Analytics or Application Insights, where you have different data sources, like exceptions, requests, traces, customEvents, you may want to search for some certain phrase everywhere, because you don’t know in which data source you should check or in which column.

There is quite handy way of doing that – search in query.

Quick example:

search in (exceptions, requests, traces, customEvents) "ManagedIdentityCredential"

And details in documentation.

Feb 17, 2022    |      0 comments

Add tag to your build and use it in release pipeline in Azure DevOps

Adding a tag to your build in Azure DevOps is very useful – you can use it later on with releases to accept only builds with certain tags. That comes in handy when you are building a project with many different configurations which you will, later on, deploy via different releases. For example:

BUILD (tag: client1) -> RELEASE CLIENT 1
BUILD (tag: client2) -> RELEASE CLIENT 2

You can use it on client basis or environment basis like dev, uat, prod.

You can add as tag whatever you want. For example variable value that you can set, when you are starting the build. You can skip next step if you want to use existing variable in your pipeline.

Create variable in your build pipeline

  1. Create or edit your existing pipeline.
  2. Go to Variables/Pipeline variables tab.
  3. Add your variable, for example EnvironmentTag and add default value.
  4. Select Settable at queue time to make sure that you can change it when you are scheduling your build.
Creating variable in build pipeline.

Add a stage to tag your build

  1. Go to the Tasks tab.
  2. It’s good to have 2 stages – one to perform all the tasks related to your build and the other to tag the build.
  3. Add PowerShell or Bash task that will add tag based on EnvironmentTag variable value: Write-Host "##vso[build.addbuildtag]$(EnvironmentTag)"
Adding new stage with Powershell task to tag build.

Execute pipeline

When you go to the build pipeline summary and go to Run pipeline you should be able to go to Variables and change EnvironmentTag value.

Run your pipeline.
Select Variables section.
Change EnvironmentTag value.

Check your tag

Once your build is completed you can go to your build and check if you have your tag in there.

Use tags in release pipelines

Once we have our build tagged, we can use that information on the release pipeline level, and for example trigger, automatic trigger based on branch and tag. Go to your release pipeline and edit the Pre-deployment conditions for your stage. In this example, I want to do an automatic release of Prod stage once the build from branch main and with tag prod is created.

Automatic release once build from main branch with prod tag is created.
Jan 25, 2022    |      0 comments

Print all environment variables in Azure DevOps for Linux Agents with Bash

If you are looking how to achieve the same goal with Windows agents and PowerShell see Print all environment variables in Azure DevOps for Windows Agents with Powershell.

If you’d like to see all the environment variables configured during your build or release on Linux agent just add the Bash task with:

printenv

so it looks like

Bash task with printenv

and when you’ll execute your build or release pipeline you should be able to see all the environment variables:

Oct 15, 2020    |      0 comments

What is your IP from the world perspective?

Often I have to make sure how I am visible to the world – what is my IP address that some service will see. I’ve found a great tool for that – ifconfig.me. You can see a lot of useful details via a browser but you can use it in console as well!

curl ifconfig.me

and you’ll have your IP address!

curl ifconfig.me
> 37.47.XXX.XXX

or even more details with:

curl ifconfig.me/all

Oct 4, 2020    |      0 comments

Print all environment variables in Azure DevOps for Windows Agents with Powershell

If you are looking how to achieve the same goal with Linux agents and Bash see Print all environment variables in Azure DevOps for Linux Agents with Bash.

OK, so I had a problem with trying to figure out which variables are available for me and what are their values – Microsoft documentation is not always that helpful on that. As inspired by Mohit Goyal post I would like to share the same idea – on how to debug all the available variables but this time on those machines where you don’t have bash but powershell instead.

Just add to your pipeline PowerShell task, switch to inline script and fill the script

Get-ChildItem -Path Env:\ | Format-List

so it looks like

and after creation of a new release pipeline and execution of this pipeline you should have something like this:

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