Querying with Resource Graph

1. Start Locally

Firstly, we need to launch Locally which we can do from a terminal by running:

Once Locally has started, the Locally Dashboard will open automatically:

2. Create something to query

Let's create a Resource Group, tagged so we can find it again later:

There's two things to note here:

1. The Azure CLI supports Automatic Configuration, meaning that it can automatically be configured to work against Locally just by prefixing commands with locally run.
2. Locally intentionally uses a different set of locations to Azure as a safety precaution, so that you can be confident you're deploying against Locally rather than regular Azure. You can also configure Locally to use the Azure locations too, but you'll want to be extra sure that you're prefixing commands with locally run when you do.

Then a Storage Account with the same tag:

And a Virtual Network without one:

3. Query by Resource Group

Resource Graph queries are written in the Kusto Query Language. Let's list everything in our Resource Group:

Location    Name               ResourceType
----------  -----------------  ---------------------------------
berlin      sample-graph-vnet  microsoft.network/virtualnetworks
berlin      samplegraphstore1  microsoft.storage/storageaccounts

Two things worth knowing about that command:

1. --query data picks the rows out of the response. Without it the table only shows the row count.
2. The Azure CLI's table output hides any column called type, which is why we rename it to resourceType.

4. Query by tag and by type

A query isn't limited to one Resource Group. This finds everything tagged env=dev across the subscription:

Name               ResourceType
-----------------  ---------------------------------
samplegraphstore1  microsoft.storage/storageaccounts

Only the Storage Account comes back, since the Virtual Network isn't tagged. If you've created other tagged resources in Locally, you'll see those too.

We can also count what's in the Resource Group by type:

Count_    ResourceType
--------  ---------------------------------
1         microsoft.network/virtualnetworks
1         microsoft.storage/storageaccounts

5. Query Resource Groups

Resource Groups and subscriptions live in the ResourceContainers table rather than Resources:

[
  {
    "location": "berlin",
    "name": "sample-graph",
    "tags": {
      "env": "dev"
    }
  }
]

We can see the Resource Group and the resources in it in the Locally Dashboard too:

6. Tidy up

Finally, we can tidy up. To remove the Resource Group and everything within it:

Doing this with other tooling

Whilst this guide used the Azure CLI, the same queries work through anything that calls Resource Graph - the Azure SDKs, Azure PowerShell's Search-AzGraph, or a Terraform data source - since they all use the same API.

Next steps

To deploy a template and then query what it created, see ARM Deployments. You can also see what you've deployed as a diagram in the Locally Dashboard - see Architecture Diagrams.

Should you encounter any issues, please take a look at the troubleshooting section.