Hello Cloud Gurus! Wondering what’s changed with Azure over the last month, but haven’t had the time to check the headlines? We’ve written an article with everything you need to know to keep in the loop.
Azure Managed Grafana became available
Grafana is a third-party multi-platform open source analytics solution. It connects with a large variety of databases, and since it’s open source, allows programmers to write plugins from scratch for greater flexibility in connection.
Just like every other monitoring platform, it allows for the analysis and monitoring of data over a period of time. It’s frequently used to track user behavior, search for errors, and to identify unique data points that might influence business decisions.
This month, Microsoft moved into general availability with Azure Managed Grafana. With it, you can run Grafana natively within Azure. This allows you to connect Azure services with other services outside of Azure using Grafana.
Changes to Azure Cost Management
Larger organizations typically have multiple Azure Directory tenants. This occurs because of mergers, acquisitions, security concerns, and separations for organization. Regardless of the reason, multiple tenants lead to a mess when trying to manage and optimize billing across organizations. This issue has actually been one of the most raised by customers when looking at Azure cost management.
To help address this issue, Microsoft recently added a new feature that allows you to manage multiple tenants from a single Microsoft Customer Agreement billing account. Once enabled, access can be granted to allow the viewing and downloading of invoices, monitoring cost, and creating additional subscriptions without having to navigate between multiple tenants.
This simplifies the process and will allow greater visibility into the costs incurred across the entire organization.
Azure Monitor change analysis capability released
In Azure Monitor, you can now access a new Change Analysis feature. Metrics, logs, and traces explain what happened with your data. Microsoft describes this feature as providing the “Why”. With change analysis, you can review resources across multiple subscriptions.
Here are a few common applications Microsoft lists for reasons to use Change Analysis:
- Troubleshooting what has changed in an application and its dependencies
- Investigating and confirms that desired changes occurred
- Routine monitoring changes and quickly sharing them with your team
- Correlating Change Analysis with other ob
- servability data using Azure
- Workbooks
- Investigating Metric spikes
- Investigating who made a change
The best news is that Change Analysis is offered at no additional cost. This is definitely something that you should spend some time exploring as it could very well cut down on investigation times, highlight problems faster, and lead to quicker resolutions of issues.
Azure and Starlink joined forces
Azure Space was announced two years ago, and this month saw a new wave of Space products, which included Azure Orbital Cloud Access Preview, and General Availability of Azure Orbital Ground Station.
Generally available: Resizing of peered virtual networks
If you use peered networks, you have likely come across running out of addresses for the peering. Your network would go offline, you’d have to remove the peering, and it was always tricky.
This month, the resizing of peered networks became generally available, and with that, a lot of stress left the building. You can now update the address space or resize it with no downtime at all, and no removal of the peering.
Updates to Premium SSD and Standard SSD Disk Storage
In the past, if you wanted to increase the size of a managed disk you had to login, wait until your VM was deallocated, resize the disk, and then spin everything back up. While waiting, whatever resources used that VM were down, and business functionality suffered (or you did, because you had to log in at 2pm in the morning).
The good news is that Microsoft has just announced that Premium and Standard SSD can now be resized live! With this update, you will now be able to expand managed disks without deallocating your VM.
There are a few limitations as this is a new service. It only works for data disks below 4TB, and doesn’t support Ultra, shared, or SSD v2 disks. You can access this feature using your favorite method, whether that’s CLI, Powershell, ARM, or the Portal.
That’s all the big September headlines for Azure wrapped up!
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