Azure Operational Insights Becomes Microsoft Operations Management Suite and Gains Some Features

Yes I know another change in the name. Let’s hope that this will be the last one. Microsoft Operations Management Suite actually includes 4 services:

• Operational Insights
• Backup (Azure Backup)
• Site Recovery (Azure Site Recovery)
• Automation (Azure Automation)

Note that the portal for this new service is Operational Insights’ portal and also Azure is no longer in the name of the service.

Now before showing what is new in Microsoft Operations Management Suite (Operational Insights) I would also to note that you will manage the services of this stack in different portals:

• Operational Insights is in Microsoft Operations Management Suite portal
• Backup in Azure portal
• Site Recovery in Azure Portal
• Automation in Azure Preview Portal or Azure Portal

I personally find this confusing but wanted to share it with you.

So let’s see what is new.

First Microsoft Operations Management  Suite portal UI is slightly changed:

Intelligence Packs are now called Solution. Probable reason for that they will no longer represent only Intelligence Packs but more.

There are 3 new solutions to represent the other services besides Operational Insights: Automation, Backup and Azure Site Recovery. All of these solutions are currently at very basic level and provide small integration surface. Let’s look at every one of them.

Automation Solution:

This solution allows you to connect to your Azure Automation account and have some basic stats showing up from it. There are a lot of links to Azure links to go manage Azure Automation there. This solution also serves as deployment mechanism for Azure Automation Hybrid Worker which I’ve shown in previous post. And this seems to be end story for integration for now.

Backup:

As Automaton, Backup Solution also offers similar integration. You can connect to Azure Backup vault and see some basic stats. There are links to go and manage Azure Backup on Azure portal.

Azure Site Recovery

This solution seems better than the above two and offers data in more rich way and again links to manage Azure Site Recovery on Azure Portal.

As I see it currently I do not think any of those 3 solution actually stores data in Operational Insights and basically gets this data from the other services directly.

Of course more previous integrations exists on these services as you can do some automation for Site Recovery or Backup and Site Recovery can leverage runbooks in Azure Automation.

Some other changes. Settings is slightly changed:

There are some things that are advertised as coming soon as gathering logs from Linux servers trough Linux agent and getting logs from AWS Storage.

Usage is also changed and now looks more useful:

And at last you can actually get syslog data from Linux machines located in Azure without agent. You can do that by going to the Azure Portal and add Storage account to data type. You will see that there is a new data type called Syslog (linux):

The bad news is I couldn’t find anywhere information how to enable Diagnostics in Azure for Linux VMs that will fill up that table. Hope documentation on that will come soon.