G'day everyone. I'm James Lee and welcome to Azure  This Week. Where it's our job to go through the   pages upon pages of Microsoft announcements and  service updates, and distill all of that down into   the top news for your easy consumption. And I tell  you, it's lucky for Lars that he's on holidays   because there were just so many updates for  me to trawl through in his absence. Just, uh,   so, so many updates. Well, maybe not that many  updates. It does look like Lars's prediction   about the lack of updates was right. But I  have picked a few that I think you'll enjoy.  

We'll take a look at a new exam sandbox from  Microsoft that I think you might find pretty   handy if you're going to sit an Azure exam.  A price reduction for Confidential Compute,   and an update to Azure Monitor, which allows you  to monitor your monitoring within Azure Monitor.   All of that coming up in Azure This Week.   If you're gonna sit your first Azure exam, it's  absolutely normal to be a little bit scared   or at least curious about what the experience  will be like. To help with this, Microsoft's new   exam sandbox is a great way to get familiar  with the look and feel of a Microsoft exam,   from start to finish. You can experience different  question types, as well as the question review and  

feedback functionality, all without the  pressure of whether you'll pass or fail.   Now, I actually did fail my exam in the exam  sandbox, but I'm sure you'll have better luck   than me. Let me know how you go in the comments  below. So whether you're new to Microsoft exams   or just looking at a refresher before you sit  your next one, it's pretty handy stuff.   You don't need to search very far these days to  find news stories of some data breach, exploit,   or other security concern. So knowing about  the different tools you can use to secure your   solutions is becoming increasingly important.  Well with Microsoft recently announcing a price  

reduction for Azure's Confidential Compute,  this might be another security tool you could   add to your arsenal. You might have heard about  protecting data in transit and data at rest. Well   with Confidential Compute we can also now protect  data in use. Protecting data in use is really   talking about data that's stored in memory, or  being processed. And to help protect that data,   Microsoft Azure provides some special virtual  machine families with added technologies that   can help securely isolate your data. And with this  change in pricing, you can now get access to these   VMs at a 33% lower price. So if you're looking  to process some secret information in the cloud,  

you might wanna check this out. Now, one  thing that shouldn't be kept a secret   is a new feature for monitoring your  monitoring within Azure Monitoring.   As Lars predicted, there haven't actually been a  lot of changes or announcements so far this year.   So I bring you an update from December 21 about  an Azure Monitor feature that you might have just   missed over the holidays. Azure Monitor has had a  lot of name changes over the years: Log Analytics,   OMS, Monitoring Solutions, and more. It can  be really quite a bit annoying to be honest,  

but it's actually because there have been so many  improvements and capabilities added over time,   just like this one. Azure Monitor has become  such a powerful monitoring solution. It helps   you to monitor apps and operating systems and  resources, both inside and outside of Azure.   So you can capture lots and lots of monitoring  data, but how do you deal with all of this data?   You do so with an Azure Monitor feature known as  Log Analytics. Sorry, no, not Log Analytics. It's   actually now called Azure Monitor Log Queries.  Well, Log Queries uses a powerful query language   to help you search through and analyze all  of that log data that you're capturing.  

But one thing that was missing was the ability  to track and monitor the log queries itself.   So as Microsoft puts it, with this update you can  now track when a query was run, who ran it, what   tool was used, the query text, and performance  statistics describing the query's execution.   So this can really help you with both the  performance and the security of your log queries.   Well folks that's a wrap for Azure This Week, the  show powered by the same cloud hamster wheels that   power Microsoft global data centers. Be sure  to check out next week's episode, which will   be brought to you by the wonderful, the wizardly,  Wayne Hoggett. Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.