Error making Azure Management Library API call when authenticating with azure active directory

Question

My company is looking into reporting on Azure. We only want our customers to give us read only credentials for us to use. I did some research and it looks like Azure Active

Answer 1

I believe you're on the right track as to why you're running into this problem.

Here's what's happening:

Essentially permission to execute Service Management API is a delegated permission and not an application permission. In other words, the API is executed in context of the user for which the token is acquired. Now you are getting this token for your application (specified by client id/secret). However your application doesn't have access to your Azure Subscription because the user record created for this application in your Azure AD is of type Service Principal. Since this Service Principal doesn't have access to your Azure Subscription, you're getting this Forbidden Error (I must say that the error is misleading because you're not using certificate at all).

There are a few things you could do:

1. Switch to Azure Resource Manager (ARM) API - ARM API is the next generation of Service Management API (SM API) and Azure is moving towards this direction only. It exclusively works off of Azure AD token. If possible, make use of that to manage your Azure resources (though you need to keep in mind that as of today not all Azure resources can be managed through ARM API). They way you do it is take your Service Principal and assign it to a particular role using new Azure Portal. Please see this link for more details on this: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/documentation/articles/resource-group-create-service-principal-portal/.
2. Use X509 Certificate - You can always use X509 Certificate based authorization to authorize your SM API requests. Please see this link for more details on that: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/ee460782.aspx#bk_cert. The downside of this approach is that the application (or whosoever has access to this certificate) will get full access to your Azure Subscription and can do everything there (including deleting resources).
3. Acquire token for a user instead of an application - This is another approach you can take. Essentially ask your users to login into Azure AD through your console application and acquire token for that user. Again, please keep in mind that this user must be a Co-Admin in your Azure Subscription and will have full access to your Azure Subscription as with SM API there's no concept of Role-based access control.