The last blog post in this series covered how I provisioned my Robotic Process Automation (RPA) test environment using Azure Automation runbooks. In this post, I will use an additional runbook to assign the newly provisioned virtual machine a specific public IP address.

I previously defined a public IP address that is whitelisted as an approved source address to access the test Salesforce environment needed for the RPA flow. This was configured for security reasons. It was also very beneficial having the same public IP address to RDP into for troubleshooting. This public IP address was used in a previous project and resides in a different resource group called Research. The following code is the PowerShell script I wrote for the automation runbook that applies this public IP to the NIC of the newly created virtual machine.

Below is an image of this automation runbook being used in the flow as part of a condition. If the resource group and the resources from the previous step were successful, then the next action in the flow will be to run a second PowerShell runbook that assigns the public IP. If the condition is not matched, a notification email will be sent to the original email requester noting a resource creation error.

The runbook used in the Assign IP action has one required parameter-vendor. This parameter is the same dynamic value used in the previous step. The Reply to email (v3) uses the dynamic values of Job ID and Status Details from the previous step as reference points for the requestor of the original email. If the condition is not met, the original email requestor will receive an email like the one shown below.

Part four in the series will cover the next action in the flow, Robotic Process Automation with WinAutomation.

Additional Reference Information:
Azure Automation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/automation/automation-intro
Automation Account: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/automation/automation-create-standalone-account
Azure PowerShell Az module: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/azure/new-azureps-module-az?view=azps-4.7.0
Manage Modules in Azure Automation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/automation/shared-resources/modules
Application and service principal objects in Azure Active Directory: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/app-objects-and-service-principals
PowerShell: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/whats-new/what-s-new-in-powershell-70?view=powershell-7
Power Automate UI Flows: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/ui-flows/

Here's a review of related posts on this series:

• Part 1: Using Microsoft Flows and UI Flows for Patch and Software Testing
• Part 2: Provisioning RPA Test Environments With Azure Automation Runbooks
• Part 3: Assigning Specific Public IP Addresses With Azure Automation Runbook
• Part 4: Robotic Process Automation with WinAutomation
• Part 5: Copying Updated WinAutomation Databases for RPA With Azure Custom Script Extensions
• Part 6: Uploading WinAutomation Screenshots to Azure Container Storage Using Invoke-AzVMRunCommand
• Part 7: Tearing Down Azure Resources and Replying to Emails Using Power Automate Flows and Azure Runbooks