About This Page
This page is part of the Azure documentation. It contains code examples and configuration instructions for working with Azure services.
Bias Analysis
Bias Types:
⚠️
powershell_heavy
⚠️
missing_linux_example
⚠️
windows_tools
Summary:
The documentation provides only a PowerShell script example for programmatically accessing audit logs via the Microsoft Entra reporting API. There are no equivalent examples using Linux-native tools (such as curl, wget, or Python), nor are there references to Bash or shell scripting. The script assumes familiarity with PowerShell, which is primarily a Windows tool, and suggests using Azure Cloud Shell (which does support PowerShell, but Bash is also available). This creates a bias toward Windows users and may hinder Linux users or those preferring cross-platform scripting.
Recommendations:
- Provide equivalent examples using Bash shell scripting with curl or wget to demonstrate how to access the API and process results on Linux or macOS.
- Include a Python example for querying the Microsoft Graph API, as Python is cross-platform and widely used.
- Explicitly mention that the API can be accessed from any platform and that PowerShell is just one option.
- Add a note or section on using Azure CLI or other cross-platform tools where applicable.
- Reorder or parallelize examples so that Windows and Linux approaches are presented together, or alternate which comes first.
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Flagged Code Snippets
# This script requires an application registration that's granted Microsoft Graph API permission
# https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/active-directory-b2c/microsoft-graph-get-started
# Constants
$ClientID = "your-client-application-id-here" # Insert your application's client ID, a GUID
$ClientSecret = "your-client-application-secret-here" # Insert your application's client secret value
$tenantdomain = "your-b2c-tenant.onmicrosoft.com" # Insert your Azure AD B2C tenant domain name
$loginURL = "https://login.microsoftonline.com"
$resource = "https://graph.microsoft.com" # Microsoft Graph API resource URI
$7daysago = "{0:s}" -f (get-date).AddDays(-7) + "Z" # Use 'AddMinutes(-5)' to decrement minutes, for example
Write-Output "Searching for events starting $7daysago"
# Create HTTP header, get an OAuth2 access token based on client id, secret and tenant domain
$body = @{grant_type="client_credentials";resource=$resource;client_id=$ClientID;client_secret=$ClientSecret}
$oauth = Invoke-RestMethod -Method Post -Uri $loginURL/$tenantdomain/oauth2/token?api-version=1.0 -Body $body
# Parse audit report items, save output to file(s): auditX.json, where X = 0 through n for number of nextLink pages
if ($oauth.access_token -ne $null) {
$i=0
$headerParams = @{'Authorization'="$($oauth.token_type) $($oauth.access_token)"}
$url = "https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/auditLogs/directoryAudits?`$filter=loggedByService eq 'B2C' and activityDateTime gt " + $7daysago
# loop through each query page (1 through n)
Do {
# display each event on the console window
Write-Output "Fetching data using Uri: $url"
$myReport = (Invoke-WebRequest -UseBasicParsing -Headers $headerParams -Uri $url)
foreach ($event in ($myReport.Content | ConvertFrom-Json).value) {
Write-Output ($event | ConvertTo-Json)
}
# save the query page to an output file
Write-Output "Save the output to a file audit$i.json"
$myReport.Content | Out-File -FilePath audit$i.json -Force
$url = ($myReport.Content | ConvertFrom-Json).'@odata.nextLink'
$i = $i+1
} while($url -ne $null)
} else {
Write-Host "ERROR: No Access Token"
}