When Software Attacks!

Using PagerDuty Orchestration with Azure Alerts

Configuring Azure alert action groups with the PagerDuty v2 api

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, March 22, 2025

Configuring diagnostic settings for Azure services using bicep

If you’re hosting your application infrastructure in Azure and consolidate the diagnostic and audit information from your services into Log Analytics or elsewhere, it’s pretty easy to do using Bicep. It’s not very well documented, however, which is the reason for this post.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, May 17, 2024

Deploying an Azure Container App Environment within a virtual network using bicep

When working on a project recently I needed to deploy a Container App Environment within a virtual network in Azure. Thanks to the joys of internet search, I started off reading the wrong bits of the official documention and got incredibly confused, and much of the community content about this uses out of date schemas and code. This article is so I don’t need to go through that again, and hopefully it will help others, too.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, May 17, 2024

Using bicep to define Service Bus scaling rules for Azure Container Apps

I recently needed to set KEDA scaling rules on an Azure Container app that used the number of messages in a Service Bus queue. There’s plenty of info out there on the internet about scaling rules, but not when it comes to Service Bus, so I’m writing up what I learned here.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, May 17, 2024

Accessing a local Hyper-V environment from the Android emulator

Not every project can host services in the cloud. If you have a local environment running on virtual machines, connecting to that from the Android emulator running on the same host can be tricky. This post details the solution I use and the tools needed to enable it.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, February 17, 2024

Importing bicep lint output as test results in Azure DevOps pipelines

Bicep is a great improvement over ARM Templates but doesn’t remove the need to validate our code at build time. I could continue to use the ARM-TTK and validate the generated template, but bicep has it’s own built in rules. Getting build errors in a way that can provide meaningful information in my CI/CD tooling is an interesting challenge.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, February 5, 2024

Calling Application Insights API using Powershell

If you have an application, instrumenting it with something like Application Insights to emit useful data is something I cannot espouse the benefits of enough. As a service, however, Application Insights can offer other benefits, such as Availability Tests to tell you if the application is accessible to your users.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, August 6, 2022

Configuring BizTalk 2020 Application Insights telemetry behind a firewall

BizTalk 2020 allows you to connect it to an Application Insights instance, where it will send tracking data as customEvents so you see what’s going on. However, getting it working in an environment where security is important and the network team want to open the fewest paths through the firewall as possible is an exercise in patience. This blog post is as much aide memoire for me as an information post for you.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, August 6, 2022

Deploying the ASDK for effective development use

Microsoft Azure Stack is a truly unique beast in terms of the capabilities it can bring to an organisation, and the efficiencies it can bring to a project that spans Public Cloud and on-premises infrastructure through it’s consistency with public Azure. We’ve been using Stack in anger for a customer project for a year now and have learned several things about development and testing, and how to configure the ASDK to be an effective tool to support the project.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, September 22, 2018

Configure Server 2016 ADFS and WAP with custom ports using Powershell

A pull request for Chris Gardner’s WebApplicationProxyDSC is now inbound after a frustrating week of trying to automate the configuration of ADFS and WAP on a Server 2016 lab. With Server 2016, the PowerShell commands to configure the ADFS and WAP servers include switches to specify a non-default port. I need to do this because the servers are behind a NetNat on a server hosting several labs, so port 443 is not available to me and I must use a different port.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, August 24, 2018