Get a screenshot of an Azure virtual machine programmatically using PowerShell and the Azure REST API

The Boot Diagnostics menu in an Azure virtual machine displays a screenshot of the virtual machine.

This screenshot is availabe in the REST API described here.

https://learn.microsoft.com/rest/api/compute/virtual-machines/retrieve-boot-diagnostics-data

For this to work you must use a POST method and have the "retrieveBootDiagnosticsData/action" permission.

The REST API call returns an object with the URL to the image at an Azure storage URL which can then be downloaded with a web client.

# Gets the screenshot for the specified virtual machine.
function Get-AzureVirtualMachineScreenshot

{

    [CmdletBinding()]
    param(

        [Parameter()]
        [Guid] $SubscriptionIdentifier,

        [Parameter()]
        [String] $ResourceGroupName,

        [Parameter()]
        [String] $Name

    )
    process
    {

        $response = Invoke-AzRestMethod -Path "/subscriptions/$SubscriptionIdentifier/resourceGroups/$ResourceGroupName/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/$Name/retrieveBootDiagnosticsData?api-version=2022-03-01" -Method POST;

        $responseObject = ConvertFrom-Json $response.Content;
        $webClient = New-Object System.Net.WebClient;
        $screenshot = $webClient.DownloadData($responseObject.consoleScreenshotBlobUri);               $webClient.Dispose();
        return $screenshot;

    }

}

 

$image = Get-AzureVirtualMachineScreenshot -SubscriptionIdentifier "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000" -ResourceGroupName "ResourceGroupName" -Name  "VirtualMachineName"[System.IO.File]::WriteAllBytes("c:\image.jpg", $image);