Hybrid Runbook Workers allow you to run runbooks within your Azure, non-Azure, and on-premises machines.  Use a hybrid runbook worker to manage on-premises resources using runbooks from your Automation account.  You can also use the hybrid runbook worker to run scripts within the machine to manage machine and application configuration, to audit state, and to troubleshoot and remediate machine or application issues.

Facts:

• A Hybrid Runbook Worker can be installed on both Windows and the Linux operating system.

• To monitor Hybrid Runbook Worker, Log Analytics must be configured with it.

• For high availability, we can installed multiple agents in the Hybrid Runbook group.

Benefits of using Hybrid Runbook Worker:

• Scalability: You can scale up the configuration specification of a Hybrid worker machine when thousands of jobs being executed each day.
• On-Prem Connectivity: By executing a Runbook job on a Hybrid Worker, you can use any PowerShell module installed on the worker in the Runbook and you shall be able to access any within network resources and services.

Limitation:

• If you are looking to share a machine to serve multiple Automation Accounts as a Hybrid worker, then its not currently supported as only one Automation Account can be configured to a single Hybrid agent.

Windows Hybrid Runbook Worker installation and configuration:

The minimum requirements for a Windows Hybrid Runbook Worker are:

• Windows Server 2012 or later
• Windows PowerShell 5.1 or later
• .NET Framework 4.6.2 or later
• Two cores
• 4 GB of RAM
• Port 443 (outbound)

Step 1 – Download the PowerShell script

Download the New-OnPremiseHybridWorker.ps1 script from the PowerShell Gallery. Once downloaded the script, copy it to your worker.

Step 2 – Run the PowerShell script

.\New-OnPremiseHybridWorker.ps1 
-AutomationAccountName <NameofAutomationAccount> 
-AAResourceGroupName <NameofResourceGroup>`
-OMSResourceGroupName <NameofOResourceGroup> 
-HybridGroupName <NameofHRWGroup> `
-SubscriptionID <AzureSubscriptionId> 
-WorkspaceName <NameOfLogAnalyticsWorkspace>

During the execution of the script, you will prompted to authenticate with Azure credentials.

Step 3 – Verify the deployment

After the script is finished, the Hybrid Worker Groups page shows the new group and the number of members. If it’s an existing group, the number of members is incremented. You can select the group from the list on the Hybrid Worker Groups page and choose the Hybrid Workers tile. On the Hybrid Workers page, you can see each member of the group listed.