You can now get one-minute Azure Monitor alerts

What's up in the world of Azure this week? We’ll take a look at updates to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) that will benefit anyone running Windows containers, an improvement to log-based alerts in Azure Monitor, and improvements to certificates in Azure API Management.

All of this coming right up. Read on!

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Microsoft has announced general availability of one-minute frequency for Azure Monitor Log Alerts.

Why is this important? Well, Azure Monitor can generate alerts based on either metrics or logs. 

Metrics are numerical data recorded over time, these include things like processor, memory usage or the number of users accessing your service. Because metrics were so lightweight, you could receive alerts relatively quickly.

Logs are richer, they include data based log events generated by Azure, or your workloads. Sometimes logs contain data that is really important to know as soon as possible, but up until this feature was available, you could only generate alerts every five minutes. An example might be a log entry warning that an application is not performing as expected.

Well now, with one-minute frequency you can get alerted faster, which means you’ll likely have less downtime, and that’s always a good thing.

Microsoft continues to deliver updates to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and I think we’ll see this trend continue.

While containers were born in Linux, Microsoft is determined to make Windows a great choice for your containerized workloads. To help bridge the gap between Linux and Windows on AKS, Microsoft has announced containerd runtime support for Windows. Containerd is an industry standard container runtime that is used across all the major cloud vendors.

Containerd offers improved launch time and consumes less resources. This means you’ll be able to run more container instances on the same number of worker nodes, and when you need to scale your workloads to meet demand, it will happen faster.

Pretty neat, right?

So many times I’ve seen outages due to certificates expiring. I used to have calendar reminders set up weeks in advance to remind me before a certificate was due for renewal, because all too often they were missed. Even Microsoft has had a global Azure storage outage due to an expiring certificate.

Managed certificates are a great solution to this problem. It works by automatically managing the renewal of your certificates to ensure you don’t get downtime when your certificates expire.

Microsoft has announced support for managed certificates on Azure API management in preview. With this feature, Microsoft provides a managed certificate for your custom domain, so you never need to worry about API Management certificates again.

You wanna know what the best part is? It’s free!

Just remember, preview features aren’t ready for production workloads, so test it out now, contain your enthusiasm, and wait for general availability before you roll it into production.

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