How to get a response of an Azure Runbook started with webhook?

Question

As I know (and Microsoft is always pointing), Runbooks will help you to do automation progress. Related to the Azure Webhook documents, it's possible to call (start/run) a Runbook, from external application using HTML POST request. and there is some simple response code to determine what is the status of post request, But seems there is no more possibility to get more response from the progress.

Am I searching wrong place and using wrong tool to make automation in Azure Could or there is some ways to send a request to Runnbok and get some response?

Extra Note: I know that it's possible to Call a Runbook from another Runbook using WorkFlow and get some responses, but the problem is if I Start a Runbook using webhook, and if there is no way to get any more response except those simple status codes, then how I can determine what is the result of my first call to do some automation? There should be some ways to get the Final result of a Runbook progress to make a decision for next step, else, Runbooks will be meaningless for automation!

Answer 1

Azure Automation is built as a fire and forget solution. It was the first piece in the event-driven architecture. Where something occurs on one system, and there is a call made to react to that.

The intention is that the runbook itself has all of the logic needed to act on its own behalf. That any further processing is done via that runbook firing another process, that could then go and inspect the output and make decisions based on that.

It does seem counter-intuitive initially - I have previously jumped through all sorts of hoops to make Automation more informative - but once you realise its purpose in the Azure infrastructure intention, it begins to kinda make sense.

If you are specifically looking for something you can fire and get a response from, Azure Functions would be the way to go.