Issues with PnP Powershell running concurrently from Azure Runbooks inside a try/catch block

[antoniobriones]

Hi everyone,

We're facing the followng issue. We have a couple of Azure runbooks to automate the enablement of certain SharePoint features, like site collection app catalog enablement, external sharing enablement and scripting enablement.

For each of them, we have one runbook that receives the site url, connects to the admin center and enables the feature.

The code of all the runbooks is pretty similar, being the only difference just the PnP command they run:

The PnP commands we're using are:

• Set-PnPTenantSite, to enable external sharing or custom scripting
• Add-PnPSiteCollectionAppCatalog, to add app catalog

We're randomnly finding the following issue that only happens if we run those runbooks at the same time. In those cases, the 30% of the time we'll face the following:

• The operations get successfully executed (that means, the app catalog is enabled, custom scripting is enabled, etc)
• But if we put that code inside a try catch, that 30% of the times, they will raise an exception
• The exception message varies, these are the ones I saw for:

Set-PnPTenantSite : Object reference not set to an instance of an object. At line:41 char:9

Connect-PnPOnline : Token request failed. At line:31 char:5

Set-PnPTenantSite : No connection, please connect first with Connect-PnPOnline At line:41 char:9

Add-PnPSiteCollectionAppCatalog : Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Background info:

• In all cases, regardless of the error, the operations were successful.
• The runbooks were never executed at the same time against the same site
• The runbooks were executed in the same time window by programatically triggering them through http request

Thanks!

[russgove]

Not sure if it's causing your issue, but when running pnp powershell in azure runbooks you need to always assign the return result to a variable - even if u don't use the variable,

[antoniobriones]

Thanks @russgove, so you suggest that would the correct approach to determine whether the operation was succesful or not. Regardless of that, the weird thing is why it is randomnly raising exceptions.