Onboard a machine to Automanage with an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template

Article
02/11/2025

Caution

On September 30, 2027, the Azure Automanage Best Practices service will be retired. As a result, attempting to create a new configuration profile or onboarding a new subscription to the service will result in an error. Learn more here about how to migrate to Azure Policy before that date.

Caution

Starting February 1st 2025, Azure Automanage will begin rolling out changes to halt support and enforcement for all services dependent on the deprecated Microsoft Monitoring Agent (MMA). To continue using Change Tracking and Management, VM Insights, Update Management, and Azure Automation, migrate to the new Azure Monitor Agent (AMA).

Overview

Follow the steps to onboard a machine to Automanage Best Practices using an ARM template.

Prerequisites

You must have necessary Role-based access control permissions
You must be in a supported region and supported VM image highlighted in these prerequisites

ARM template overview

The following ARM template will onboard your specified machine onto Azure Automanage Best Practices. Details on the ARM template and steps on how to deploy are located in the ARM template deployment section.

{
    "$schema": "https://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2019-04-01/deploymentTemplate.json#",
    "contentVersion": "1.0.0.0",
    "parameters": {
        "machineName": {
            "type": "String"
        },
        "configurationProfileName": {
            "type": "String"
        }
    },
    "resources": [
        {
            "type": "Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/providers/configurationProfileAssignments",
            "apiVersion": "2022-05-04",
            "name": "[concat(parameters('machineName'), '/Microsoft.Automanage/default')]",
            "properties": {
                "configurationProfile": "[parameters('configurationProfileName')]"
            }
        }
    ]
}

ARM template deployment

This ARM template will create a configuration profile assignment for your specified machine.

The configurationProfile value can be one of the following values:

"/providers/Microsoft.Automanage/bestPractices/AzureBestPracticesProduction"
"/providers/Microsoft.Automanage/bestPractices/AzureBestPracticesDevTest"
"/subscriptions/[sub ID]/resourceGroups/resourceGroupName/providers/Microsoft.Automanage/configurationProfiles/customProfileName (for custom profiles)

Follow these steps to deploy the ARM template:

Save this ARM template as azuredeploy.json
Run this ARM template deployment with az deployment group create --resource-group myResourceGroup --template-file azuredeploy.json
Provide the values for machineName, and configurationProfileName when prompted
You're ready to deploy

As with any ARM template, it's possible to factor out the parameters into a separate azuredeploy.parameters.json file and use that as an argument when deploying.

Next steps

Learn more about Automanage for Linux and Windows

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