Category: Operations Management Suite

Azure Monitor Alert Series – Part 7

On this blog post we will cover Azure Monitor Log Alerts. You might know them as Log Analytics alerts but a long time has passed when Log Analytics was standalone service that was not part of Azure Monitor. You may have noticed some UI improvements of those but the biggest improvements were actually under the hood. To my opinion this migration was executed very good with a lot of issues for the customers. No it was not perfect migration but taking into considerations all the complexity of such migrations I would say it was well executed and with thought for the customers. To be honest I will also say that these types of alert are my favorite. The simple reason for that is because by using Kusto queries I have way more room to improvise. Of course the alerts have their own downsides as well but that is the beauty of Azure Monitor alerts. You have flexible choices without being forced to specific one. Enough with the flattery and continue to the interesting parts of this blog post.

As I have mentioned before in Part 1 of the series we have two sub types:

  • Number of results
  • Metric Measurement
Continue reading “Azure Monitor Alert Series – Part 7” →

Azure Monitor Alerts Series – Part 1

Alerts are important part of our monitoring and probably the most important one. Getting data and visualizing it is the foundation for alerts but in order to move to actual monitoring you need alerts. I can tell you nobody sits all day in front of dashboard and looks at visualized data. Alerts are also our knowledge of our applications and infrastructure gathered to help us when things are not going as planned. I wanted to write this blog post series for quite some time and I think this is the right time to do it. The reason for that is Classic Azure alerts are being deprecated and the vision of unified alerting capabilities is coming together and becoming more powerful… sort of. I will comment on parts that I think could and should be improved and hopefully they will be. I also expect some new features around Ignite as usually that is when Microsoft reveals some new stuff. They actually do it all the time it just the end development of some features matches Ignite conference time frame.

Continue reading “Azure Monitor Alerts Series – Part 1” →

Free Book: Inside Azure Management v3

For the last several months Pete Zerger, Tao Yang, Kevin Greene, Anders Bengtsson and me have been working hard to update Inside OMS book. With the latest changes we are now on version 3 of the book and with new name: Inside Azure Management

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Finding Diagnostic Logs for Azure Services

For the last a couple of years many Azure services has started to produce diagnostic logs and metrics. These two allows you to monitor and troubleshoot the Azure Services. Unfortunately still there are some services that are missing those. To pull diagnostic logs and metrics Azure Monitor has capability called Diagnostic settings which allows you to place them on Azure Storage, Event Hub or Log Analytics. Microsoft has done a good job to document many of diagnostic logs available but still I find some services that haven’t be documented. Luckily there is a way to find what diagnostic logs are available for a service (resource) and this blog post will focus on that.

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It Is Time to Erase OMS Acronym From Your Dictionary

As I still see people confused and not informed about OMS I’ve decided to write this blog post and lay my thoughts around the end of OMS.
If you are not sure what is OMS that is ok and you do not necessary need to know but if you are curious you should check out my blog post What is OMS and a Brief History of It. At Ignite 2018 Microsoft probably announced the last major change related to OMS. This was announced on the Azure blog and at Ignite session. To put it in short Log Analytics (which is in 99% what people refer to when they say OMS) is part of Azure Monitor. In Azure Monitor you might see it being called just Logs for short. But besides that there are actually way more changes some of which happened at Ignite others were happening for quite some time.

Continue reading “It Is Time to Erase OMS Acronym From Your Dictionary” →