Azure: Determining the Parameters to Change in Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Templates

Overview

In the post "Azure: Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates for creating Virtual Machines for Standard Window's SKU's" it was shown how to create an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template that can be used to create a virtual machine. Also shown was how to generate the template's parameter file. There are dozens of parameters so what this post demonstrates is how to determine which parameters to modify.

Reading the parameters file it can be seen that one parameter, adminPassword is assigned to null as it is a password. The adminPassword parameter's value was excluded when the parameter file was created as is shown below:

The name of the VM specified when the ARM template was created was Machine04. The parameters tied to this machine name are:

• networkInterfaceName
• networkSecurityGroupName
• publicIpAddressName
• virtualMachineName
• virtualMachineComputerName

A simple way to determine the parameters requiring modification is to:

1. Create a copy of the parameters file
2. In the copy of the parameters file change the text value of Machine04 to Machine123
3. Perform a diff on the original parameters file and the modified copy of the parameters file

The remainder of this post is a list of tools that are useful in determining the parameters that need to be updated when deploying an ARM templet.

Visual Studio Code: File Compare

See previous blog post: Visual Studio Code: Comparing Text Files

Quickdiff.net

A handy online way to diff two text files is to use https://quickdiff.net/. I like this site because the diff has options defined as follows:

QuickDiff.net shows the differences as follows:

Jsondiff.com

The site, http://www.jsondiff.com/, allows to Json objects (the parameters files are just Json objects) to be compared. The aforementioned site identifies how many differences there are between the Json objects:

The site, jsondiff.com, also allows navigation between all differences detected: