MEMCM debug using Azure blob

Introduction

Transitioning more and more to modern, many strive to get rid of the classic VPN for their endpoints. As we have more options managing endpoint without building a large and complex infrastructure it become natural to disconnect the traditional access model and build more enterprise applications to authenticate with your azure account.

When devices are roaming around on internet and have no VPN connection, it is somewhat more difficult to singlehandedly connect to an endpoint and investigate issues. This blogpost will cover how to deal with that using Azure blob as a temporary storage provider for logging.

Thanks, Tom Degreef for inspiration!

 

Requirements

• Azure storage account
• CMG

 

Azure Storage

Go to portal.azure.com

 

I already have a storage account I can use. We choose the storage account where “kind” says BlobStorage. (How to create the storage account is not covered by this blog)

 

Create a new Container

 

Create “templogs”

Public access level: Blob

Be sure you read the exclamation mark. This container is not a place to store sensitive data for a longer period, but for this purpose it will be ok.

 

Choose Storage Explorer

 

Get Shared Access Signature

 

Set expiry time to the future some time.

Add permissions

Create

  

Copy the Container name

Copy the Query string

Save them to notepad for now.

Close

   

Prepare your client environment

Before we can run the script on clients, we need to make sure they have the PowerShell modules.

Azure.Storage and AzureRM.profile

Start a Windows 10 client and fire up PowerShell shell.

 

Install-module azure.storage

Go through the prompts

  

Install-module azureRM.profile

Go through the prompts

  

To automize this, go to file explorer

Copy the folder Azure.Storage and AzureRM.profile

Create a script and a MEMCM package that copies these 2 folders to your clients.

Deploy the package to your clients.

 

MEMCM preparations

Download this script

Start your MEMCM Console

Create Script

Copy the content of the Github Script

  

Paste the code to the script in MEMCM.

We need to change the xxx parameters

 

StorageAccountName can be found here:

 

StorSas parameter where the string we saved to notepad earlier.

Container parameter also went to the notepad doc.

When added, click next next and done.

  

Approve the script

And we are ready to rock and roll getting logs

  

Right click a device -> run script

 

Get logs from device

Next

   

On the device CPC-TEST02 it starts adding a zip file containing a lot of good logs to debug info on that client.

 

And on the Azure Storage

You can either choose to grab it manually or go to Tom Degreef’s blog and get his download script, to automate the last part. Look for “Retrieve the logs”

 

Summary

There is always a scenario that goes into haywire and we need a way to reach out and have some insight of the problem. Guiding a user how to do things can be time consuming and not very agile. We need to be able to get logs even though our endpoints roam the internet. This is good example of how that can be achieved.

Happy testing!