Yesterday Microsoft announced the evolution of DevOps. Or rather the evolution of DevOps tooling from Microsoft known as Visual Studio Team Services: Azure DevOps.

Azure DevOps represents 15 years of engineering in services to help developers turn an idea into production code. Azure DevOps offers Pipelines, Boards, Artifacts, Repos and Test Plans to cover all aspects of modern software engineering.

I’ve had a question today coming from a colleague that has no prior experience in System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). He wanted to know how data flows from connected agents (regardless of Windows or Linux) to Log Analytics and subsequently to Azure Security Center.

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.

Almost all Azure management services run in/for any cloud. Among them is Update Management which automates OS patching for both Linux and Windows machines whether they are running on-premises, in Azure or in other clouds.

Security is an essential item for most customers. Different strategies are employed to secure environments and make sure assets are kept secure. One of those strategies is to isolate the network where the assets are placed and allow communication only through a proxy. This comes with it’s own challenges - I’ll highlight some of them with regards to Update Management.

Nearly every customer I talk to about Azure management asks me this: “How can I do process monitoring?”. As there is currently no way to directly instrument either the Windows or the Linux agent to do explicit process monitoring another way need to be found.