Tag Archives: dns

DNS in Microsoft Azure – DNS Security Policies

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This is part of my series on DNS in Microsoft Azure.

Hi there folks! After a busy July packed with a vacation and an insane amount of work , I’m back with a new post. Today I’m going to cover a new feature that has been years coming. Yes folks, DNS query logging is now native to the platform with the introduction of DNS Security Policies into GA (generally available) last month. No longer will you have to solution around this long painful gap. In this post I’ll walk through what this new resource is, what it can do (beyond DNS query logging), cover the use cases I’ve tested with it, show you some samples of the logs, and finally cover some potential designs to incorporate it. Let’s dive in!

A long time coming

If you’ve ever spent time troubleshooting a connection error or trying to detect, block, and analyze malware you are likely familiar with the value of DNS query logs. The former makes it a must for day-to-day operations and the latter a critical piece of data for information security. Historically, it’s been a pain to gather this in Microsoft Azure. The wire server (magic IP, 168 address, whatever your favorite nickname) that is made available within a virtual network to use Azure’s built-in DNS resolution service has lacked the capability to capture DNS queries. This mean queries from compute within your virtual network that were resolving to Azure Private DNS zones or a public DNS zone via Azure-provided DNS weren’t captured. Even the introduction of the Azure Private Resolver didn’t address this gap. This lead to customers with requirements to capture DNS query logs having to get fancy.

The most common pattern customers used to address this gap was to introduce a third-party DNS service like an Infoblox, Bluecat, BIND server, or even Windows DNS Server that all compute running within Azure would use for resolution. While customers were able to use this pattern to get the logs, it meant more virtual machines, more costs, more overhead, and it was typically too expensive to implement for workloads that may require complete isolation and didn’t fit into a typical hub and spoke pattern.

Example design for BYODNS for query logging

When the Azure Private Resolver service got introduced along with DNS Forwarding Rule Sets, customers using Azure Firewall had the option of ditching the third-party DNS service and using Azure Firewall’s DNS proxy service which included DNS query logging (kind odd it went there first, right?). This was another common pattern I saw pop up in that Azure Firewall customer base.

Example design using Azure Firewall for DNS query logging and Azure Private DNS Resolver

Beyond whatever other creative ways customers were addressing this gap, it was a gap and it was costing customers extra money. In comes DNS Security Policies to save the day.

DNS Security Policies Components

DNS Security Policies provide 2 core functions today:

  1. DNS query filtering
  2. DNS query logging

Before I dive into those features in depth, I’m a fan of looking at the resource as a whole from the API layer to get an idea of the components, their purpose, and their relationships.

DNS Security Policies and related resources

DNS Security Policies fall under the Microsoft.Network resource provider and are regional resources. The simplest way to understand a resource provider is to think of a namespace in traditional programming. Within a namespace there are resource types (think classes) with specific resource operations. Within the Microsoft.Network resource provider, the three direct children resources that are key.

You’ll notice the Microsoft Learn documentation uses different terminology from what the API uses for some of the resources. To keep things simple, I’ll be using the Microsoft Learn documentation. Here is a quick cheat sheet:

  • DNS Resolver Policies -> DNS Security Policy
  • DNS Security Rules -> DNS Traffic Rules
  • DNS Resolver Domain Lists -> Domain Lists

Each DNS Security Policy has two children resources: DNS Traffic Rules and Virtual Network Links. DNS traffic rules are the guts of your logic for the DNS Security Policy. Each policy can have up to 10 rules (as of August 2025). Each rule consists of a priority (100 – 65000), action (block, allow, alert), and related domain list (I’ll cover these in a few). You can create multiple rules and order them in priority similar to the screenshot below.

DNS Traffic Rules example

Based on the above logic, when the DNS Security Policy triggers a rule based on the domain matching the associated domain list. If the domain being requested is in the list associated with the priority 100 rule, the query is blocked. If not, it’s then processed by the alert rule (which seems to do nothing in my experience as I’ll cover later). Finally, it will hit the last rule which will allow it through but log it.

As I covered above, each rule is associate with one or more domain list. Domain lists are sibling resources to DNS Security Policies. By being a sibling vs a child, they can be re-used across multiple DNS Security Policies (and whatever other use Microsoft comes up with). This allows you to define your domain lists centrally and re-use them across multiple rule sets if, for example, you wanted to maintain your domains lists consistently across environments (test/qa/prod/etc). Domain lists are pretty simple resources consisting of a domain name or wildcard (denoted by a period). It’s important to understand how the domains will be processed. For example (I’m going to steal this direct from the docs), if you allow contoso.com at rule 100 but block bad.contoso.com at rule 110 the query to bad.contoso.com will be allowed because it falls under contoso.com which was allowed by a higher priority rule.

Example of a domain list

The virtual network link resource is the other child of the DNS Security Policy. This functions similar to the virtual network links with Private DNS Zones as it associates the DNS Security Policy to a virtual network where it will process queries sent through the wire server (Azure-provided DNS). Each virtual network can be linked to one DNS Security Policy but each DNS Security Policy can be linked multiple virtual networks allowing you to use them for those virtual networks connected in a hub and spoke like architecture with centralized DNS as well as those virtual networks that may require complete network isolation.

Example of DNS Security Policy virtual network links

DNS Security Policies support diagnostic logging. This allows you to send each query captured by the policy to storage, event hub, or a log analytics workspace. If using a log analytics workspace, the logs are written to a table named DNSQueryLogs. Log entries will look like the below. You’ll get the key pieces of information such as source IP address of the query and the action taken on it. Here you’ll see the query was denied which is indicated by the ResolverPolicyRuleAction. The values here will be “Deny” for blocks, “None” for alerts, and “Allow” for anything allowed.

Example of DNS Query Logs log entry

When the query is denied, instead of getting back an NXDomain, the machine making the query receives back a CNAME of blockpolicy.azuredns.invalid indicating the query has been blocked by DNS Security Policy. This is much better behavior than a NXDomain because now we know what the culprit for the failed DNS query is.

Example of DNS query being denied by DNS Security Policy

To visualize how the allow and deny works, I threw together two quick and dirty visual representations.

Example of how Allow and Block DNS Traffic Rules work

Scenarios you may be wondering about

Like many of you, I’m curious to see what does work and doesn’t work. I went through and tested a variety of scenarios. Here are a few below and my results when using these policies:

  • Machine using an external DNS server and is not using wire server (magic IP, 168 address, etc)
    • Query is not logged by DNS Security Policies
  • Machine using its wire server in its virtual network
    • Query is captured
  • Machine using Private DNS Resolver in the same virtual network
    • Query is captured
  • Machine using a DNS Proxy which sits in front of the Private DNS Resolver
    • Query is captured
  • Machine queries an A record or PTR record
    • Query is captured
  • Machine queries AAAA record
    • Query is captured
  • Machine queries using TCP-based query instead of UDP-based query
    • Query is captured
  • PaaS Services tested successfully
    • Azure Bastion
    • Azure Firewall

How might you use this?

So now you better understand how the service works and what it does. I’ll now tell you how I’d use it. I’m sure folks smarter than me will come out with more effective ways, but here is how I’m envisioning it now.

Based on the testing I’ve done (and testing done by one of my wonderful peers Chris Jasset) the DNS Security Policies seem to take effect at the wire server. This means you’ll want to link the policies to the virtual networks where DNS packets are directed to the wire server. In a centralized DNS design such as below, this would be linked to the virtual network containing the Azure Private DNS Resolver or 3rd-party DNS solution. You would need one DNS Security Policy per region give they are regional in nature.

Sample design for centralized DNS resolution

If you’re using a distributed DNS model, or have isolated virtual networks, your design would look something more like below. Here the DNS Security Policies are linked to each virtual network to ensure the packet is captured at the wire server of the virtual network where the query originates.

Sample design for distributed DNS Security Policy

As for domain lists, I think most organizations will likely have three separate domain lists. One for block, one for alert (again I don’t find this super useful as of now), and one for allow. These domain lists could be established in a production subscription and shared across lower environments to ensure consistency of blocked domains across environments.

Summing it up

There are a few big takeaways for you this post:

  • It’s time to revisit how you’re capturing DNS query logs. If your only reason for implementing a third-party DNS service was DNS query logging, you may want to revisit that to see to see if this new solution is more cost effective.
  • Just like Azure Private DNS, don’t forget to link your policy to the right virtual network. Whatever virtual network you’re sending DNS queries to the wire server is where these should be linked.
  • DNS query logs are very chatty. You may want to look at ways of optimizing what you capture (if you’re sending it to a third-party logging solution) of how much you retain (if you’re keeping it in a Log Analytics Workspace). This is especially true if you use a wildcard in the allow to capture everything. PaaS especially is very chatty. If you aren’t careful about this, you’ll owe Microsoft a big fat check by the end of that first month.

Lastly, I threw together some samples of the creation of these resources in Terraform if you’re curious. You can find the code here.

Well folks, hopefully you learned something new today. Thanks as always for taking the time to read the content!


DNS in Microsoft Azure – Private DNS Fallback

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This is part of my series on DNS in Microsoft Azure.

Updates:

  • 7/30/2025 – Updated blog to reflect feature is now generally available

Hello folks! I wanted to get at least one blog post in before 2025 so today I’m going to bring the conversation back to DNS once again. I’m going to be hitting on an advanced topic today, so if you’re unfamiliar with DNS in Azure, read up on my prior posts. I’m going to be skipping through much of the basics.

Today we’re going to talk about one of the challenges that tends to pop up when customers begin to heavily use PrivateLink Private Endpoints and Azure Private DNS. You will likely run into this challenge at some point (if you haven’t already) when you attempt to collaborate with another organization using Azure, when using services like Azure Fabric where one BU (business unit) manages Azure and another manages Azure Fabric, or when working across multiple Entra ID tenants.

Brew your coffee, we’re about to dive into the weeds!

As I’ve covered in past posts, Microsoft provides you out-of-the-box DNS resolution for each VNet (virtual network) via the Azure-provided DNS service (I’m going to refer to it as the WireServer for the rest of this post). The WireServer can be reached at 168.63.129.16 from endpoints deployed to the virtual network and will route DNS queries to either Microsoft public DNS resolvers or to Private DNS zones. Private DNS Zones allow customers to host internally-facing DNS namespaces and are very commonly used with PrivateLink Private Endpoints for Microsoft PaaS (platform-as-a-service) services due automatic lifecycle management of the A records for the Private Endpoints. Thus our challenge begins to peek its ugly head.

Example DNS Resolution for Private Endpoints when using Private DNS

Alrighty, I get it. You know all this and it’s boring you. Let’s get to the good stuff.

What if you need to collaborate with another organization and they also use Private Endpoints? How might this cause some issues?

Let’s take a scenario where Bob works for Contoso and Alice works for Fabrikam. Alice over at Fabrikam produces a daily dump of data from a financial system to an Azure Storage Account as a blob. Bob over at Contoso pulls that data down into his environment for analysis by employees of Contoso. Alice provides this dump to over a hundred customers. Due to this large volume of customers, she has opted to provide it over a public endpoint only.

Bob living the good life with resolution working as he expects

This process has been working flawlessly for years and Bob’s life has been good. One day, Bob’s life isn’t good and his automation fails. After lots of troubleshooting involving both Contoso and Fabrikam, it’s determined that DNS resolution is failing when trying to resolve the name of the storage account.

As it turns out, Alice’s Information Security team made it a standard to use Private Endpoints and she turned on a Private Endpoint for the storage account. The creation of the Private Endpoint creates a CNAME for the storage account in public DNS for fabrikam.privatelink.blob.core.windows.net. Since Contoso has this Private DNS Zone configured in its environment, Bob’s query gets redirect to Contoso’s Private DNS Zone which doesn’t have the record and instead returns an NXDOMAIN.

Bob having a bad day with the DNS resolution failing due to Fabrikam turning on a Private Endpoint for the storage account

Historically, this has been a pain to deal with. Customers have had to work around it by creating local host records (yuck), defining the FQDN (fully-qualified domain name) for the storage account as a zone, or creating conditional forwarders for specific FQDNs in their on-premises DNS service. While both will work, it can become a real headache at scale and can make troubleshooting resolution a complete nightmare. Yes, there is always the option of the 3rd party injecting a Private Endpoint into your virtual network, but I rarely see this occur across my customer base in situations where 3rd parties are servicing a large number of customers. Likely due to complexity and cost (yes Private Endpoints and the data transferring through them do have costs and can add up with large amounts of data).

Microsoft introduced a new feature in 2024 called “Fallback to Internet for Private DNS” which seeks to address this problem once and for all. With this feature customers can configure whether resolution should fallback to public DNS on a per virtual network link basis for each Private DNS Zone. This means you can pick which Private DNS Zones fallback to public DNS. Maybe you want to do it for privatelink.blob.core.windows not, but privatelink.database.windows.net. If you use different resolution paths (meaning separate virtual network links) for production and non-production, you can choose to fallback only for non-production while keeping today’s behavior for production. This gives you a ton of flexibility in how you handle resolution.

In the Azure Portal you will see an option in a virtual network link called Enable fallback to Internet. When you enable this option Azure DNS will fallback to public DNS resolution if it can’t find a record in a Private DNS Zone. With fallback off it’s set to the value of Default and if fallback is on it’s set to the value of NxDomainRedirect.

New option in Azure Portal to enable DNS fallback

If we revisit Bob’s challenge. He can now resolve this by enabling fallback on the virtual network link used by his endpoint’s resolution path for the privatelink.blob.core.windows.net. When the WireServer receives back an NXDOMAIN, it will then try to resolve it via public DNS yielding the public endpoint IP Bob needs for Fabrikam’s storage account.

DNS resolution with fallback in place

This feature makes dealing with the scenario way more straightforward. I haven’t heard a good reason to not enable this by default. If you have one in mind, definitely post in the comments.

So your key takeaways:

  1. The usage of Private Endpoints across organizations can create split-brain DNS-like scenarios that require lots of DNS record management overhead.
  2. This feature will help to address those scenarios. You should use it where it makes sense, but it shouldn’t be your default.

Thanks for reading!

A first look at the Azure DNS Private Resolver

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Updates

  • 10/12/22 Update – Private Resolver is now Generally Available!
  • 7/2025 Update – This post is old and will not maintained. Check out my whole series on Azure DNS for updated content.

Hello again!

Today I’m going to cover the new Azure DNS Private Resolver feature that recently went into public preview. I’ve written extensively about Azure DNS in the past and I recommend reading through that series if you’re new to the platform. It has grown to be significantly important in Azure architectures due to its role in name resolution for Private Endpoints. A common pain point for customers using Private Endpoints from on-premises is the requirement to have a VM in Azure capable of acting as a DNS proxy. This is explained in detail in this post. The Azure DNS Private Resolver seeks to ease that pain by providing a managed DNS solution capable of acting as a DNS proxy and conditional forwarder facilitating hybrid DNS resolution (for those of you coming from AWS, this is Azure’s Route 53 Resolver). Alexis Plantin beat me to the punch and put together a great write-up on the basics of the feature so my focus instead be on some additional scenarios and a pattern that I tested and validated.

I’m a big fan of keeping infrastructure services such as DNS centralized and under the management of central IT. This is one reason I’m partial to a landing zone with a dedicated shared services virtual network attached to the transit virtual network as illustrated in the image below. In this shared services virtual network you put your DNS, patching/update infrastructure, and potentially identity services such as Windows Active Directory. The virtual network and its resources can then be dropped into a dedicated subscription and locked down to central IT. Additionally, as an added bonus, keeping the transit virtual network dedicated to firewalls and virtual network gateways makes the eventual migration to Azure Virtual WAN that must easier.

Common landing zone design

The design I had in mind would place the Private Resolver in the shared services virtual network and would funnel all traffic to and from the resolver and on-premises or another spoke through the firewall in the transit virtual network. This way I could control the conversation, inspect the traffic if needed, and centrally log it. The lab environment I built to test the design is pictured below.

Lab environment

The first question I had was whether or not the inbound endpoint would obey the user defined routes in the custom route table I associated with the inbound endpoint subnet. To test this theory I made a DNS query from the VM running in spoke 2 to resolve an A record in a Private DNS Zone. This Private DNS Zone was only linked to the virtual network where the Private Resolvers were. If the inbound endpoint wasn’t capable of obeying the custom routes, then the return traffic would be dropped and my query would fail.

Result of query from VM in another spoke

Success! The inbound endpoint is returning traffic back through the firewall. Logs on the firewall confirm the traffic flowing through.

Firewall logs showing DNS traffic from spoke

Next I wanted to see if traffic from the outbound endpoint would obey the custom routes. To test this, I configured a DNS forwarding rule (conditional forwarding component of the service) to send all DNS queries for jogcloud.com back to the domain controller running in my lab. I then performed a DNS query from the VM running in spoke 2.

Firewall logs showing DNS traffic to on-premises

Success again as the query was answered! The traffic from the outbound endpoint is seen traversing the firewall on its way to my domain controller on-premises. This confirmed that both the inbound and outbound endpoints obey custom routing making the design I presented above viable.

Beyond the above, I also confirmed the Private Resolver is capable of resolving reverse lookup zones (for PTR records). I was happy to see reverse zones weren’t forgotten.

One noticeable gap today is the Private Resolver does not yet offer DNS query logging. If that is important to you, you may want to retain your existing DNS Proxy. If you happen to be using Azure Firewall, you could make use of the DNS Proxy feature which allows for logging of DNS queries. Azure Firewall could then be configured to use the Private Resolver as its resolver providing that conditional forward capability Azure Firewall’s DNS Proxy feature lacks.

That wraps up this post.

Thanks!

A Pattern for App Services with Private Endpoints

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A Pattern for App Services with Private Endpoints

Hello again fellow geeks.

Last year Microsoft announced the general availability of Private Endpoint support for App Services. This was a feature I was particularly excited about because when combined with regional Vnet integration, it offered an alternative to an ASE (App Service Environment) for customers who wanted to run internally-facing applications or who didn’t feel comfortable exposing their publicly facing application directly via a public IP.

Over the past year I created a few different labs that demonstrated these features including a web app and function app. Each lab was built around a hub and spoke architecture where the application was serving as an internally-facing application. Given my recent post on Azure Firewall Premium, and the fact I still had the lab environment up and running, I thought it would be interesting to switch the virtual machine out and switch App Services in, which resulted in the lab environment pictured below.

Lab environment

I established the following goals for the lab environment:

  1. Perform IDPS on traffic to the web app
  2. Mediate and inspect traffic initiated from the web app to third-party APIs
  3. Expose a web application to the Internet without giving it a direct public IP address

To accomplish these goals I was able to re-use much of the pattern I described in my last post.

The first step in the process was to create a very simple hub and spoke architecture as pictured above. The environment would consist of a transit Vnet (virtual network), shared services Vnet, and spoke Vnet. The transit Vnet would contain the guts of the solution with an Azure Firewall Premium SKU instance and Azure Application Gateway v2 instance. In the shared services Vnet I used a Windows Server VM (virtual machine) running the DNS Server service and providing DNS resolution for the environment. I could have taken a shortcut here and used Azure Firewall’s DNS proxy capability, but I like to leave the options open for conditional forwarding which Azure Firewall and Azure Private DNS do not support at this time. Finally, in the spoke Vnet I created two subnets. One subnet hosted the private endpoint for App Services and the other subnet was delegated to App Services to support regional Vnet integration.

Once all components were in place, I deployed a simple Python web application I wrote. All it does it queries two public APIs, one for the current time and the other for a random Breaking Bad quote (greatest show of all time!). I took the cheating way out and deployed the app directly via Visual Studio using the Azure App Service add-in prior to deploying the private endpoint and regional Vnet integration capabilities. This allowed me to test the app to validate it was still working as intended while also allowing me to deploy the app from my home machine. Deploying a private endpoint for app services locks down not only access to the running application but also to the SCM (source control management) endpoint that is used for deploying code to the app.

The next step was to create the Azure Private DNS Zone for app services which is named privatelink.azurewebsites.net. I then linked this zone to my shared services Vnet and setup the DNS server running in that Vnet with a standard forward to 168.63.129.16. This setup allows DNS queries made to the Private DNS zone to be resolved by the DNS server. I’ve written extensively about how DNS works with Azure Private Link so I won’t go into any more detail on that flow. Last step in the DNS process is to configure each Vnet to use the DNS server IP in its DNS Server settings. This also needs to configured directly on the Azure Firewall.

Now that the infrastructure would be able to resolve queries to the Private DNS Zone used by App Services, it was time to create the private endpoint for the web app. This registered the appropriate DNS records in the Private DNS Zone for my web app. With the private endpoint created, the last step was to enable Vnet integration.

Private DNS Zone with records for App Service instance

At this point I had all the guts of my solution and it was time to configure traffic to flow the way I wanted it to flow. Before I could begin work in Azure I needed to do the work outside of Azure. This involved creating an A record in my DNS hosting provider to point the public DNS name of my web app to the AGW’s (Application Gateway) public IP. This name can be whatever you want as long as you provide a certificate to the AGW such that it will identify itself as that name to the user. The AGW configuration is very straightforward and this tutorial will get you most of the way there. One thing to note is you’ll need to set the backend to point to the name given to the app service. This allows you to take advantage of the certificate Microsoft automatically provisions to the given app service.

App Gateway backend config

Since I wanted to route traffic destined for the web app through the Azure Firewall Premium instance, I needed to ensure the AGW trusted the certificate served up by Azure Firewall. This is done by modifying the HTTP setting used in the AGW rule for the app. Here you can upload the root certificate that issued the Azure Firewall Premium intermediate certificate.

App Gateway HTTP Setting

Now that the AGW is configured, I needed to create a route table for the subnet the AGW has its private IP address in. In this route table I disabled BGP (border gateway protocol) propagation to ensure the default route since this AGW v2 requires a default route pointing directly to the Internet. Now this is where it gets interesting from a routing perspective. Whenever you create a private endpoint for a service, a system route is added to the route table of all the subnets within the private endpoint’s vnet (virtual network) as well as any vnet the private endpoint’s vnet is peered with. If I want traffic from the AGW to route through the Azure Firewall, I need to override that system route with a /32 UDR. As you can imagine, this can become extremely tedious at scale and even risks hitting the max routes per route table depending on the scale we’re talking about. On the positive side, the issues around this are something Microsoft is aware of so hopefully that means this will be addressed at some point. In the meantime you’ll need to use the /32 route in a pattern such as this.

App Gateway route table

Azure Firewall Premium needs to be configured to allow traffic from the AGW to the web app and inspect this traffic. You can check out my last post for instructions on configured Azure Firewall to perform these activities.

Excellent, work is done right? Nope! If we influence routing on one side, we have to ensure the other side routes the same way. Toss a route table on the private endpoint subnet you say? Sorry, that isn’t supported my friend. Instead I needed to enable the Azure Firewall instance to SNAT (source NAT) traffic to the spoke Vnet. This ensures routing is symmetric and will eliminate any potential connection issues by creating only the UDR on the AGW subnet.

Incoming traffic flow

Lastly, I needed to create and apply a route table to the subnet I delegated to App Services for regional Vnet integration. This route table can be very simple and be configured with a single UDR for the default route pointing to the Azure Firewall private IP. This results in the traffic flow below:

Outgoing Internet traffic flow

This one was another fun pattern to solve. I got a chance to mess around more with AGW and also get a pattern I had theorized would work actually working. I find implementing the pretty pictures I draw helps drive home the benefits and considerations of such a pattern. With this pattern specifically, it suffers from similar considerations as the pattern in my last post. These include:

  • Challenges with observability
  • Operational overhead of certificate management
  • Possible latency issues depending on latency requirements and traffic patterns

This pattern tacks on more operational overhead by requiring that /32 route be added to the AGW route table each time a new app service is provisioned with a private endpoint. Observability further suffers when tracing a packet flow end-to-end due to the additional layer of SNAT required via Azure Firewall. One thing to note about this is you may be able to get around the SNAT requirement for web-specific traffic because of the transparent proxy functionality behind Azure Firewall application rules. I want to highlight I have not tested this myself and I typically tend to SNAT for this use case in my lab because many of my customers may use similar patterns but with a 3rd party firewall.

So there you go folks, another pattern to add to your inventory. Hopefully we’ll see the /32 issue issue private endpoints resolved sometime in the near future. Have a great weekend!