Azure automation can be an Azure administrator's best friend and can ease up your day to day administration work. There are three options available in Azure automation- Graphical runbooks, PowerShell Work flow and Powershell based runbooks If you want to play around with Azure automation and want to quickly automate some daily mundane tasks, graphical runbooks are the easiest to start with . You can find many templates in the runbooks gallery in Azure that can easily get the job done easily for you. Lets start with the basics. One of the common tasks that needs to be done is to start or stop VM at a scheduled time, say for eg: your Dev/Test machines that should be shutdown after office hours. The runbooks for this are readily available in the gallery. In this blogpost we will focus on a graphical runbook available in the gallery that can be used to start or stop VMs at a scheduled time. Schedule automated start and stop of VMS using graphical runboo