If you are archiving diagnostic logs or activity logs to a storage account through Azure Monitor be aware that on Nov 1, 2018 there will be a breaking change in the format.

The current format of the PT1H.json file in the storage account uses a JSON array or records. This looks something like:

When using Azure Backup to manage (geo-)distributed backups across a company you may find that the Azure Backup Reports with Power BI is limited to a single storage account. Unfortunately the reporting telemetry coming from Azure Backup needs to be written to a storage account that is in the same region as the Recovery Services Vault.

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Change Tracking is a versatile feature that allows to monitor changes on a system (both Windows and Linux). Change tracking covers software installation, changes to services, daemons, Registry and the file system. This is available for both cloud based (Azure, AWS, GCP), on-premises and service provider hosted systems (given network connectivity to Azure).

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In many scenarios there is the requirement to enrich or lookup data with meta information from the infrastructure. In this scenario a file with machine, location and other meta information was placed during deployment on the VM for both Azure and AWS.

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When setting up Azure File Sync one of the requirements is to have the Azure PowerShell Cmdlets (AzureRM) installed. Many customers have proxies deployed which control internet egress. Many of these also use authentication to secure internet access.

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I like to share on LinkedIn and asked myself why I’m not sharing the articles I write for my blog. The you-just-have-to-do-it factor, plain laziness and lack of time are the primary reasons why I have not posted links to LinkedIn so far.

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Currently billing for Azure Security Center is reported on a per-node, per-month basis. Starting July 1st 2018 this reporting will be changed to per-node, per-hour to achieve more granularity in billing. Billing is still pro-rated thus you’ll only pay for the time a node was actually using the service.

Centralized integration with an identity provider is a common ask. It provides increased security and removes the reliance on out-of-band managed user accounts.

It is now possible to configure Azure Active Directory login for Ubuntu-based VMs (16.04 LTS & 17.10) through the Device Flow authentication process. This is currently in preview and only available in the South Central US region.

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Monitoring the container infrastructure which is running your applications is important. With the emergence of managed Kubernetes such as Aure Container Service (AKS) this becomes more tricky as part of the infrastructure is managed by somebody else.

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Important step in bringing SAP on Azure to the customer. The M-series that was GA’ed in December 2017 and is memory optimized (up to 128 vCPUs and 4TB RAM) has been certified by SAP to run services.