How to use Azure Runbooks to restart an Azure Web App on a schedule

Question

We have an Azure Web App that we want to setup an automatic restart on a schedule. If I wanted to use Runbooks for this, how would I add one or multiple apps to automatically restart on different schedules?

Answer 1

There are a number of different ways to do this, and some will depend on the Azure-Runbook module versions you have.

1. You need to setup a user as 'RunAsConnection' user
2. To get a connection, you can use the cmdlet: Get-AutomationConnection
3. Then to add an authenticated account, you use: Add-AzureRmAccount
4. If you have multiple subscriptions, you will need to select the subscription to use: Select-AzureRmSubscription
5. Finally, use Restart-AzureRmWebApp to restart the web app.

If you set a $result= Restart-AzureRmWebApp, if the $result is null, then it didn't work, otherwise you will see the status of the running webapp. Eg. $result.State = "Running" if it worked successfully.

To do this on a schedule: go to your Runbook > Schedules > Add Schedule.

Add the input parameters, and select/create a recurring schedule. Click Ok and you're done!

*** If you use a parameter for your webAppName, then you can reuse the runbook, and just add different schedules with different input params

Sample Code.

try
{
    $servicePrincipalConnection= Get-AutomationConnection -Name "AzureRunAsConnection"

    # Logging in to Azure
    $account = Add-AzureRmAccount `
        -ServicePrincipal `
        -TenantId $servicePrincipalConnection.TenantId `
        -ApplicationId $servicePrincipalConnection.ApplicationId `
        -CertificateThumbprint $servicePrincipalConnection.CertificateThumbprint

    Select-AzureRmSubscription -SubscriptionName "Azure subscription name"

    $result = Restart-AzureRmWebApp `
                -ResourceGroupName "Resource Name"
                -Name "Name of webapp you want to restart"

    if($result)
    {
        $state = $result.State
        Write-Output ("Web app restarted and is now $state")  #State should be Running at this point
    }
   else
   {
        Write-Output ("Web app did NOT restart")
   }
}
catch
{
    Write-Output ("Web app did NOT restart")
    throw $_.Exception
}