Azure Policy Little Secrets

Azure Policy checks Azure resources and operations by matching their properties against defined business rules. It helps to enforce organizational standards and to assess compliance at-scale. Azure Policy is commonly used to enforce governance across Azure, ensuring consistency, regulatory compliance, security controls, cost management, and operational standards. Unfortunately, Azure Policy has its secrets; it has some limitations that are either not documented or the documentation is not so easy to find. With this blog post, I am not trying to bash on Azure Policy as I love the service and I think its architecture is very good, but due to the way some Azure APIs are written it can limit what Azure Policy can do.

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Finding Columns that are used by more than one service in AzureDiganostics table

AzureDiagnstics table is used by many Azure Services when you send diagnostic logs thus the 500 column limit that Microsoft is trying to fix for that table. When you hit that limit there is currently the described workaround but let’s say you have used one service that was sending logs and you no longer use that service. The logs associated with that service are yet to purged but you also want to clean up any custom columns that the service was using. That way you can free some slots for new custom columns for new services that will send logs to AzureDiagnostics table. Of course you can delete the custom column from Log Analytics blade but you do not want to delete a custom column that is also used by another service. This will be a short blog post that I will show you how to find if custom column is used by more than one service by using Kusto query language.

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Inside Azure Management V4 Book Now Available

The time has come to publish the Inside Azure Management v4 book. This is the only free book that focuses on Azure Management. If you want you can also support us with purchase from Amazon. Links for both the free and purchasable version you will find below. It is needless to say that the authors of this book Pete Zerger, Tao Yang and Kevin Greene and me have put a lot of effort. Additionally also Ryan Irujo, Alexandre Verkinderen and Bert Wolters have put also a lot of effort in authoring of certain chapters. I would like to thank to all authors for the great work. Comparing v3 to v4 release we have tried to make the existing content better with providing even more examples. Overall we have followed the same guidance as before: trying to give you less content that is already available and focus on tips, tricks, scenarios and examples. Any feedback you can send it to us via e-mail: insidemscloud (at) outlook.com. I hope that you will enjoy our work and you will find it useful.

Free download

Amazon

Code repository

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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What is OMS and a Brief History of It

While discussing Azure/OMS topics in the community I often see incorrect usage of OMS (Operations Management Suite). That is understandable of course as Microsoft hasn’t done good job at clearing out all the terms but I still think we should be using the correct term when posting questions or discussing OMS in forums and other sites. This can help us communicate better between each other and especially in forums could result to answering question faster. As we the move from OMS Portal to Azure Portal it was about time to write this blog post which I’ve intended to do for quite some time but always delayed due to different circumstances.

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