The Azure Sensor Pack is a mature and powerful product that helps many customers world-wide monitor their Azure estate. On top of being a robust monitoring engine, the Azure Sensor Pack also offers a rich API (Application Programmatic Interface) that allows customers to maximize the sensor pack capabilities even further. The API has been around for a long while and we decided to dedicate a blog article for its capabilities.
Installation
If you have not done so already, run the latest installer of the Azure Sensor pack (4.2.14 or later) and choose to install the AutoMonX Azure Backend Service.
You can also install the service manually by opening a CMD as administrator and running the following command:
AutoMonX_AzureCollector.exe -install_backend
Security
By default, the API service is listening on TCP Port 8075 only on the localhost IP address. The service will not accept any attempts to access it from outside the machine it was installed on. Having said that, the API Server can be configured to receive requests from external IP addresses configured in a file called “AzureSensor_ACL.ini”.
UPDATE_WIN_FW=TRUE
ALLOWED_IP=8.8.8.8,8.8.4.4
Add all the machine's IP addresses you wish to allow access to the API, into the value of ALLOWED_IP. A relevant Windows Firewall rule will be created to allow the connection, and will be updated with every Azure Backend service restart if you add clients to the list.
If you wish to manually configure the Windows Firewall, change the value of UPDATE_WIN_FW to FALSE.
What can you achieve with the Azure Sensor API?
Initiate Azure auto-discovery with multiple options (quick, metrics and thorough)
Check the auto-discovery status
Automatically add resources found by the Azure Sensor pack to PRTG
Add and remove connection profiles of Azure Tenants
To list all the options supported by the API, use any web browser and access the following URL: http://127.0.0.1:8075/api
Below are some examples of the API calls
Starts a discovery process for an Azure tenant:
Check Auto-discovery status:
Add discovered Azure resources to PRTG:
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