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🔧 How I Used Claude Code to Deploy a Security Scan Across Many Azure VMs

Sometimes the best way to learn a new Azure feature is to have an AI agent explain it to you while you're under pressure to deliver.

I'd been asked to deploy a third-party security scanning agent across our Azure VM estate. Should have been straightforward — except the usual deployment routes, GPO and Intune, both fell flat for different reasons. I was left without an obvious path forward. Rather than spend hours trawling through documentation for something I might not even find, I opened Claude Code and described the problem. What came back was an Azure feature I'd barely touched before, and within half a day the whole thing was done.

📚 From PDF Overload to AI Clarity: Building an AI RAG Assistant

Introduction

If you’ve ever tried to dig a single obscure fact out of a massive technical manual, you’ll know the frustration 😩: you know it’s in there somewhere, you just can’t remember the exact wording, cmdlet name, or property that will get you there.

For me, this pain point came from Office 365 for IT Pros — a constantly updated, encyclopaedic PDF covering Microsoft cloud administration. It’s a superb resource… but not exactly quick to search when you can’t remember the magic keyword.
Often I know exactly what I want to achieve — say, add copies of sent emails to the sender’s mailbox when using a shared mailbox — but I can’t quite recall the right cmdlet or property to Ctrl+F my way to the answer.

That’s when I thought: what if I could take this PDF (and others in my archive), drop them into a centralised app, and use AI as the conductor and translator 🎼🤖 to retrieve the exact piece of information I need — just by asking naturally in plain English.

This project also doubled as a test bed for Claude Code, which I’d been using since recently completing a GenAI Bootcamp 🚀.
I wanted to see how it fared when building something from scratch in an IDE, rather than in a chat window.

👉 In this post, I’ll give a very high level overview of the four iterations (v1–v4) - what worked, what failed, and what I learned along the way.

🔥 Vibe Coding My Way to AI Connected Infra: Claude, Terraform & Cloud-Native Monitoring

📖 TL;DR – What This Post Covers

  • How I used AI tools to build an Azure-based monitoring solution from scratch
  • Lessons learned from developing two full versions (manual vs. Terraform)
  • The good, bad, and wandering of GenAI for infrastructure engineers
  • A working, cost-effective, and fully redeployable AI monitoring stack

Introduction

This project began, as many of mine do, with a career planning conversation. During a discussion with ChatGPT about professional development and emerging skill areas for 2025, one suggestion stuck with me:

"You should become an Infrastructure AI Integration Engineer."

It’s a role that doesn’t really exist yet — but probably should.

What followed was a journey to explore whether such a role could be real. I set out to build an AI-powered infrastructure monitoring solution in Azure, without any formal development background and using nothing but conversations with Claude. This wasn’t just about building something cool — it was about testing whether a seasoned infra engineer could:

  • Use GenAI to design and deploy a full solution
  • Embrace the unknown and lean into the chaos of LLM-based workflows

🍓 Building AI-Powered Infrastructure Monitoring: From Home Lab to Cloud Production

After successfully diving into AI automation with n8n (and surviving the OAuth battles), I decided to tackle a more ambitious learning project: exploring how to integrate AI into infrastructure monitoring systems. The goal was to understand how AI can transform traditional monitoring from simple threshold alerts into intelligent analysis that provides actionable insights—all while experimenting in a safe home lab environment before applying these concepts to production cloud infrastructure.

What you'll discover in this post:

  • Complete monitoring stack deployment using Docker Compose
  • Prometheus and Grafana setup for metrics collection
  • n8n workflow automation for data processing and AI analysis
  • Azure OpenAI integration for intelligent infrastructure insights
  • Professional email reporting with HTML templates
  • Lessons learned for transitioning to production cloud environments
  • Practical skills for integrating AI into traditional monitoring workflows

Here's how I built a home lab monitoring system to explore AI integration patterns that can be applied to production cloud infrastructure.

🤖 First Steps into AI Automation: My Journey from Trial to Self-Hosted Chaos

What started as 'let me just automate some emails' somehow turned into a comprehensive exploration of every AI automation platform and deployment method known to mankind...

After months of reading about AI automation tools and watching everyone else's productivity skyrocket with clever workflows, I finally decided to stop being a spectator and dive in myself. What started as a simple "let's automate job alert emails" experiment quickly became a week-long journey through cloud trials, self-hosted deployments, OAuth authentication battles, and enough Docker containers to power a small data centre.

In this post, you'll discover:

  • Real costs of AI automation experimentation ($10-50 range)
  • Why self-hosted OAuth2 is significantly harder than cloud versions
  • Performance differences: Pi 5 vs. desktop hardware for local AI
  • When to choose local vs. cloud AI models
  • Time investment reality: ~10 hours over 1 week for this project

Here's how my first real foray into AI automation unfolded — spoiler alert: it involved more container migrations than I initially planned.

How I Used ChatGPT to Create AZ-400 Exam Prep Notes from MSLearn

🚀 TL;DR - Results First

Using the method detailed in this post, I successfully passed the AZ-400 exam while creating a reusable study system. This approach helped me transform 34+ hours of MSLearn content into structured, searchable revision notes that I could quickly reference during my exam preparation.

Let me walk you through how I developed this system and how you can apply it to your own certification journey.

Copyright © 2026 Matthew Pollock