In this last post of the blog series, I will cover how I used Power Automate flows and Azure runbooks to tear down my Azure resources and reply, with proof, to the original flow requester that execution was successful.

There are two parallel branches that complete the flow. These actions include deleting all of the resources used by the UI flow in the test environment and responding to the original flow requester by email. All of the resources used for testing were deleted so that I did not incur any additional Azure charges for the test environment. The easiest way to do this was to delete the entire resource group. To do this, I used the Az PowerShell command Remove-AzResourceGroup. Once authenticated, Remove-AzResourceGroup only requires only the Resource Group parameter in order to execute. The runbook, with service principal authentication, looks like this:

The screenshot below shows the flow action with variable Vendor as a prefix to -ResourceGroup, which is the only required parameter in the runbook shown above.

As this action is taking place, a parallel branch is also running. The parallel branch sends an email reply to the original flow requestor of the email notifying them that the flow has completed successfully.

In the email reply, I wanted to add evidence that the user workflow tested was successful. I could have just added the paths to the Azure blob, but I decided to attach the screenshot zip file from the Azure storage container to the email. To accomplish this, first I needed to initialize a variable which was the container location of the WinAutomation screenshots.

The value of the blob is the path to the container and blob. The initialize variable action is necessary because at the time of the flow creation, the winautomation.zip file, which is the storage blob, does not exist. The file is not created until after the UI flow action is run. With the variable configured, I used the Get blob content action under the Azure Blob Storage service connector.

The blob value in the Get blob content action is the blob variable that is defined under initialize variable. The blob variable represents /winautomation-logs/WinAutomation.zip.

Now that the blob content is established in the flow, I was able to use the Reply to email (v3) action from Office 365 Outlook to respond to the sender of the original email trigger and add the blob content as an attachment.

The only required value in this action is message id. The required message id is the dynamic value of the message id found in the “When a new email arrives (V3)” original flow trigger seen in the image below.

The body is not a required value, but I wanted to add some text with the Vendor variable selected for parts of the body that may change, based on the vendor software being upgraded or patched.

With the message id and body of the email defined, the last step was to attach the blob content as an attachment to the email. First, I needed to define what the attachment name was. I used the (vendor variable) _Flow_Screenshots.zip as the name attachment. Note: it is important to define the extension. The attachments content is the dynamic value of File Content from the Get blob content action or it will not be attached correctly.

Below is an example reply that the original email requestor receives:

The final flow steps:

Note: There are several conditional statements that provided errors by email if the overall flow or UI flow failed.

This flow proves out the use case that through Flows, UI Flows, and Automation Runbooks, Microsoft provides the platform to create and test user workflows in order to gain efficiency and confidence in the patch and software update process.

Additional Information and Links:
Initialize a Variable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBS3wyWZo6Q
Az PowerShell: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/azure/new-azureps-module-az?view=azps-4.6.1
Stop Azure V2 VMs: https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Stop-Azure-ARM-VMs-1ba96d5b
Graphical Runbooks: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/automation/automation-graphical-authoring-intro
Remove-AzResourceGroup: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/az.resources/remove-azresourcegroup?view=azps-4.6.1
Azure Blob Storage: https://us.flow.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/shared_azureblob/azure-blob-storage/
https://github.com/optiv/azure_runbooks

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