Category: Governance

My Thoughts on Azure Naming Conventions and Tags Usage

In IT naming of resources has been around for quite some time. In some of the early days IT personal was using super hero names, constellation names, etc. to name their servers. That was when the number of servers count was equal or less than your fingers. Over the years the number of servers has went up which required using naming convention. Another need for the naming convention was also the different role each server had. Of course with the coming of the cloud the result is that even more resource started to be generated. Strangely though we haven’t changed much our guidelines for naming resources much compared to how we did it on-premises. But may be it is time to change them?

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Lower Log Analytics Cost with Serverless

With the recent capability of setting retention period for Log Analytics data per table a lot of new possibilities of managing and retaining your data pop-up. A common scenario is that you may have a lot of performance data which may be logged every minute or even every 10 seconds. You need that data in such short intervals in your Log Analytics workspace only for the past month or so but you do not need such granularity for older data. At the same time it is good to have some summarization (aggregation) of that data for longer period due to compliance, analysis, etc but there is a cost associated when you retain a lot of data for longer period. By using serverless and the new per table retention capability now you can achieve this and save cost. In this blog I will show you how you can achieve this with simple example.

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Send Subscription Activity Logs via ARM Template

At Ignite the Azure Monitor team has announced that you can now send subscription activity logs to Log Analytics. Wait? What? Isn’t that already available? And the answer yes it was available before but if we look closer you will see that the previous implementation was not very native to Azure. With the new implementation besides making the API better there are also other improvements like faster ingestion, ability to send different categories, etc.

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Set Capacity Reservation SKU to Log Analytics via ARM Template

Right before Ignite Microsoft has released a new SKU for Log Analytics. With that SKU the model of usage does not change but it is rather discount you get for committing certain usage in your Log Analytics workspace. To me it is similar to reserved instances but on a monthly bases. This SKU is also related to Azure Sentinel as it is the recommended SKU when you have onbarded Log Analytics workspace to Azure Sentinel.

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Azure Monitor Alert Series – Part 11

So far we have covered all the alert types that are available not only in Azure Monitor but other services like Sentinel and Cost Management as well. That does not end this series though as we haven’t other important parts of the alerting like integration. In this blog particularly we will cover Action Groups and Action Rules. These are two very important features in order to achieve complete monitoring.

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