Azure Quick Review

• 1: Overview
• 2: Usage
• 3: Install
• 4: Recommendations
• 5: Related Projects
• 6: Troubleshooting & Support
• 7: Resources & References
• 8: Contribution Guidelines

1 - Overview

Azure Quick Review (azqr) is a powerful command-line interface (CLI) tool that specializes in analyzing Azure resources to ensure compliance with Azure’s best practices and recommendations. Its main objective is to offer users a comprehensive overview of their Azure resources, allowing them to easily identify any non-compliant configurations or areas for improvement.

Azure Quick Review Recommendations

Azure Quick Review (azqr) scans your resources with 2 types of recommendations:

• Azure Resource Graph (ARG) queries provided by the Azure Proactive Resiliency Library v2 (APRL) project.
• Azure Resource Manager (ARM) queries built with the Golang SDK

To learn more about the recommendations used by Azure Quick Review (azqr), you can refer to the documentation available here.

Scan Results

The output generated by Azure Quick Review (azqr) is written by default to an Excel file, which contains the following sheets:

• Recommendations: a list with all recommendations with the number of resources that are impacted. You can use this table as an action plan to improve the compliance of your resources.
• ImpactedResources: a list with all resources that are impacted. You can use this table to identify resources that have issues that need to be addressed.
• ResourceTypes: a list of impacted resource types.
• Inventory: a list of all resources scanned by the tool. Here you’ll find details such as SKU, Tier, Kind or calculated SLA.
• Advisor: a list of recommendations provided by Azure Advisor.
• DefenderRecommendations: a list of recommendations provided by Microsoft Defender for Cloud.
• OutOfScope: a list of resources that were not scanned.
• Defender: a list of Microsoft Defender for Cloud plans and their tiers.
• Costs: a list of costs associated with the scanned subscription for the last 3 months.

By default, Azure Quick Review (azqr) obfuscates the Subscription Ids in the output to ensure the protection of sensitive information and maintain data privacy and security. If you want to display the Subscription Ids without obfuscation, you can use the --mask=false flag when executing the tool.

Azure Quick Review can also generate an csv files with the same information as the excel. To generate the csv files, you can use the --csv flag when running the tool.

A Power BI template is also available to help you visualize the results generated by Azure Quick Review. You can create the template running Azure Quick Review with the pbi command and then loading the excel file generated by the tool.

Supported Azure Services

Azure Quick Review (azqr) currently supports the following Azure services:

Code of Conduct

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct

Trademark Notice

Trademarks This project may contain trademarks or logos for projects, products, or services. Authorized use of Microsoft trademarks or logos is subject to and must follow Microsoft’s Trademark & Brand Guidelines. Use of Microsoft trademarks or logos in modified versions of this project must not cause confusion or imply Microsoft sponsorship. Any use of third-party trademarks or logos are subject to those third-party’s policies.

2 - Usage

Authentication

Azure Quick Review (azqr) supports the following authentication methods:

• Service Principal. You’ll need to set the following environment variables:
  • AZURE_CLIENT_ID
  • AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET
  • AZURE_TENANT_ID
• Azure Managed Identity
• Azure CLI (Using this type of authentication will make scans run slower)

Authorization

Azure Quick Review (azqr) requires the following permissions:

• Reader over Subscription or Management Group scope

Running the Scan

To scan all resources in all subscription run:

./azqr scan

To scan all resources in a specific management group run:

./azqr scan --management-group-id <management_group_id>

To scan all resources in a specific subscription run:

./azqr scan -s <subscription_id>

To scan a specific resource group in a specific subscription run:

./azqr scan -s <subscription_id> -g <resource_group_name>

For information on available commands and help run:

./azqr -h

Filtering Recommendations and more

You can configure Azure Quick Review to include or exclude specific subscriptions or resource groups and also exclude services or recommendations. To do so, create a yaml file with the following format:

azqr:
  include:
    subscriptions:
      - <subscription_id> # format: <subscription_id>
    resourceGroups:
      - <resource_group_resource_id> # format: /subscriptions/<subscription_id>/resourceGroups/<resource_group_name>
    resourceTypes:
      - <resource type abbreviation> # format: Abbreviation of the resource type. For example: "vm" for "Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines"
  exclude:
    subscriptions:
      - <subscription_id> # format: <subscription_id>
    resourceGroups:
      - <resource_group_resource_id> # format: /subscriptions/<subscription_id>/resourceGroups/<resource_group_name>
    services:
      - <service_resource_id> # format: /subscriptions/<subscription_id>/resourceGroups/<resource_group_name>/providers/<service_provider>/<service_name>
    recommendations:
      - <recommendation_id> # format: <recommendation_id>

Then run the scan with the --filters flag:

./azqr scan --filters <path_to_yaml_file>

Check the rules to get the recommendation ids.

3 - Install

Install on Linux or Azure Cloud Shell

latest_azqr=$(curl -sL https://api.github.com/repos/Azure/azqr/releases/latest | jq -r ".tag_name" | cut -c1-)
wget https://github.com/Azure/azqr/releases/download/$latest_azqr/azqr-ubuntu-latest-amd64 -O azqr
chmod +x azqr

Install on Windows

Use winget:

winget install azqr

or download the executable file:

$latest_azqr=$(iwr https://api.github.com/repos/Azure/azqr/releases/latest).content | convertfrom-json | Select-Object -ExpandProperty tag_name
iwr https://github.com/Azure/azqr/releases/download/$latest_azqr/azqr-windows-latest-amd64.exe -OutFile azqr.exe

Install on Mac

Use homebrew:

brew install azqr

or download the latest release from here.

4 - Recommendations

Azure Quick Review checks the following recommendations for Azure resources. The recommendations are categorized based on their impact and category:

5 - Related Projects

AZQR and APRL

As of version 2.0.0-preview, Azure Quick Review (azqr) includes all Azure Resource Graph queries provided by the the Azure Proactive Resiliency Library (APRL), which are used to identify non-compliant resources.

Azure Quick Review (azqr) extends APRL by providing per service instance SLAs, Diagnostic Settings detection and more. Therefore, scan results display AZQR or APRL, to indicate the source of the recommendation.

APRL provides a curated catalog of resiliency recommendations for workloads running in Azure. Many of the recommendations contain supporting Azure Resource Graph (ARG) queries

AZQR compared to Azure Review Checklists and PSRule.Rules.Azure

Azure Quick Review (azqr) was created to address a very specific need we had back in 2022. Initially, we had to run three assessments to get a clear picture of various solutions in terms of SLAs, use of Availability Zones, and Diagnostic Settings. At the time, we were not aware of the existence of the review-checklist or PSRule.Rules.Azure.

When some of our peers saw the assessments we were able to deliver with the early bits of Azure Quick Review (azqr), they asked us to add more checks (recommendations) and change the output format from markdown to Excel.

As many of our customers work in restrictive environments, the ability to run a self-contained, cross-platform binary while using read-only permissions became a key feature.

Moving forward to 2023, based on great feedback from both peers and customers, we moved the original repo to the Azure organization, added support for more services, fixed some issues and even added a Power BI template.

In August 2024, we added all APRL recommendations to Azure Quick Review (azqr) and removed duplicates in favor of the ones already available as Azure Resource Graph queries.

When compared with PSRule.Rules.Azure, Azure Quick Review (azqr) only scans deployed Azure resources and provides recommendations based on the current state. Azure Quick Review (azqr) does not scan ARM templates or Bicep files.

When compared to the review-checklist, Azure Quick Review (azqr) also provides an actionable list of more than 400 recommendations (70+ Azure resource types), that can be used to improve the resiliency of your Azure solutions.

6 - Troubleshooting & Support

If you encounter any issue while using Azure Quick Review (azqr), please set the AZURE_SDK_GO_LOGGING environment variable to all, run the tool with the --debug flag and then share the console output with us by filing a new issue.

Support

This project uses GitHub Issues to track bugs and feature requests. Before logging an issue please check our troubleshooting guide.

Please search the existing issues before filing new issues to avoid duplicates.

• For new issues, file your bug or feature request as a new issue.
• For help, discussion, and support questions about using this project, join or start a discussion.

Support for this project / product is limited to the resources listed above.

7 - Resources & References

Microsoft Documentation

• Azure Well-Architected Framework
• Azure Availability Zones
• Azure Service Level Agreements
• Azure Diagnostic Settings
• Azure Private Link
• Azure Advisor
• Microsoft Defender for Cloud
• Azure Cost Management + Billing

Related Projects

• Azure Proactive Resiliency Library (APRL)
• review-checklist
• PSRule.Rules.Azure

8 - Contribution Guidelines

Contributing

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.microsoft.com.

When you submit a pull request, a CLA-bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., label, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repositories using our CLA.

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.