microsoft / microsoft/sre-agent

[Feature] native support for SRE Agent to access firewall-enabled Key Vaults

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enhancement
Dominant language
PowerShell
Stars
160
Forks
97
Avg merge
2d 5h
Merged PRs (30d)
12

Description

## Feature description

Native support for SRE Agent to read secrets and certificates from Key Vaults with the firewall enabled (public network access restricted to selected networks, or private endpoint only).

Currently listed under [Known limitations](https://sre.azure.com/docs/capabilities/azure-observability-vnet#known-limitations) — and notably, it's the only row in that table without a documented control plane alternative.

## Use case

Firewall-enabled Key Vault is a baseline security control in most enterprise Azure environments — it's commonly required by internal security policy and compliance frameworks. Without data plane access, SRE Agent cannot access secrets for instance for GitHub authentication using a Key Vault secret or help investigate a meaningful class of incidents.

Example of investigations:
- Expired or soon-to-expire certificates
- Rotated or revoked secrets causing downstream auth failures
- Key Vault access policy / RBAC misconfigurations
- Apps failing to start due to missing or unreadable secrets

These are exactly the kinds of incidents where SRE Agent would add the most value, but today the agent is blind to them when the standard enterprise hardening is applied.

## Current workaround

None that scales (or basically have Key Vault public accessabel).

## Proposed approach

A few directions, in rough order of preference:

1. **Native private endpoint support** for Key Vault data plane from the agent's managed infrastructure.
2. **Expanded control plane fallback** — even without data plane access, exposing more via ARM (e.g. certificate expiry, secret metadata, recent access policy changes via Activity Logs) would close a large part of the gap and would make the `—` in the limitations table go away.

Even a rough roadmap signal on which of these is in scope would help us plan around the limitation.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the linked Known limitations entry and inspect the existing SRE Agent paths for Key Vault access, managed infrastructure networking, ARM, and Activity Logs. Compare native private endpoint access with the proposed control-plane fallback; done would be a supported approach or a clear roadmap decision for firewall-enabled Key Vaults.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
azure
Domain
cloud, security
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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