Some interesting points regarding automated deployment of Alert Rules within an Azure Resource Group template

After some recent endeavours to add Application Insights alert rules, I stumbled (quite sorely) over some quirks around defining Alert Rules within an ARM template:

1) When copying an existing definition out of the Azure portal, there will be a "hidden-link:..." prefixed tag in the tags section of the resource definition. Normally tags are simply extra metadata, but in the case of Application Insights and its related artifacts, the "hidden-link:" tag is actually a functional requirement. You can't delete it! Otherwise, the ARM template deployment will throw a very unhelpful 'Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Management.Monitoring.MonitoringServiceException' with no further details.

2) When defining Alert Rules on custom metrics, those metrics must *already* exist within the existing Application Insights instance. Otherwise, as above, the ARM template deployment will throw a very unhelpful 'Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Management.Monitoring.MonitoringServiceException' with no further details. The consequence of this is that you won't be able to define such alert rules when deploying a new resource group using the ARM template for the first time! Otherwise, it will fail and you'll be unable to execute the resource group deployment step.

Unable to add multiple listen rule keys or subscriptions to a Topic in an Azure Service Bus in an Azure Resource Group template

I recently ran across a problem wherein I was unable to add multiple Listen rules for my applications to my Topics in Azure Service Bus within an Azure Resource Group Template. I would run my template and it would fail to create the keys for the Topic or the Subscription for the topic of there was more than one of either of those for the Topic. It wouldn't even be consistent: it would switch back and forth between them between runs of the template. After a discussion with one of the Solution Architects at Microsoft, I found out there is, at the time of this writing, a bug in the Azure Resource Manager for Topics within Service Buses that prevents Topic access rules and subscriptions from being simultaneously created. As a work around, I was instructed to introduce an artificial dependency between each of the subscriptions to force the resource manager to create them serially rather than in parallel and this did the trick.

For example:

// TODO: