Quickstart: Run your first Resource Graph query using Azure CLI

Article
03/18/2022

The first step to using Azure Resource Graph is to check that the extension for Azure CLI is installed. This quickstart walks you through the process of adding the extension to your Azure CLI installation. You can use the extension with Azure CLI installed locally or through the Azure Cloud Shell.

At the end of this process, you'll have added the extension to your Azure CLI installation of choice and run your first Resource Graph query.

Prerequisites

If you don't have an Azure subscription, create a free account before you begin.

Add the Resource Graph extension

To enable Azure CLI to query Azure Resource Graph, the extension must be added. This extension works wherever Azure CLI can be used, including bash on Windows 10, Cloud Shell (both standalone and inside the portal), the Azure CLI Docker image, or locally installed.

Check that the latest Azure CLI is installed (at least 2.0.76). If it isn't yet installed, follow these instructions.

In your Azure CLI environment of choice, import it with the following command:

# Add the Resource Graph extension to the Azure CLI environment
az extension add --name resource-graph

Validate that the extension has been installed and is the expected version (at least 1.0.0):

# Check the extension list (note that you may have other extensions installed)
az extension list

# Run help for graph query options
az graph query -h

Run your first Resource Graph query

With the Azure CLI extension added to your environment of choice, it's time to try out a simple tenant-based Resource Graph query. The query returns the first five Azure resources with the Name and Resource Type of each resource. To query by management group or subscription, use the --managementgroups or --subscriptions arguments.

Run your first Azure Resource Graph query using the graph extension and query command:
```
# Login first with az login if not using Cloud Shell

# Run Azure Resource Graph query
az graph query -q 'Resources | project name, type | limit 5'
```
Note

As this query example does not provide a sort modifier such as order by, running this query multiple times is likely to yield a different set of resources per request.
Update the query to order by the Name property:
```
# Run Azure Resource Graph query with 'order by'
az graph query -q 'Resources | project name, type | limit 5 | order by name asc'
```
Note

Just as with the first query, running this query multiple times is likely to yield a different set of resources per request. The order of the query commands is important. In this example, the order by comes after the limit. This command order first limits the query results and then orders them.

Update the query to first order by the Name property and then limit to the top five results:

# Run Azure Resource Graph query with `order by` first, then with `limit`
az graph query -q 'Resources | project name, type | order by name asc | limit 5'

When the final query is run several times, assuming that nothing in your environment is changing, the results returned are consistent and ordered by the Name property, but still limited to the top five results.

Clean up resources

If you wish to remove the Resource Graph extension from your Azure CLI environment, you can do so by using the following command:

# Remove the Resource Graph extension from the Azure CLI environment
az extension remove -n resource-graph

Next steps

In this quickstart, you've added the Resource Graph extension to your Azure CLI environment and run your first query. To learn more about the Resource Graph language, continue to the query language details page.

Get more information about the query language