Blog Post

Azure Arc Blog
2 MIN READ

Azure Best Practices delivered to machines anywhere with new Azure Arc and Automanage integration.

aurnovcy's avatar
aurnovcy
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Apr 19, 2023

Tired of manually onboarding and configuring Azure services for your Arc-enabled servers? With Azure Automanage Machine Best Practices, you can point, click, set, and forget to extend Azure security, monitoring, and governance services to servers anywhere.

 

Directly from Azure portal, you can generate an extensible onboarding script can be run on Windows and Linux servers running on-premises or other clouds like AWS, GCP, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Within the single server onboarding experience for Azure Arc, you can select to enable Azure Automanage as you onboard machines to Azure Arc. This means you can go onboard your Azure Arc-enabled servers to Azure services from Day 1.

 

 

Azure Automanage offers you the flexibility to onboard to all or a customized subset of these Azure services.

  • By connecting to an Azure Log Analytics workspace and Azure Automation account, you can unlocking capabilities across security and management without needing to plan for deployment.
  • Through Machine Insights Monitoring, we capture key operating system performance indicators related to processor, memory, network adapter, and disk utilization helping to identify bottlenecks.
  • Through Update Management, we deliver patching helping to quickly assess the status of available OS updates and manage the process of installing OS updates.
  • Through Azure Automanage Machine Configuration, we deliver an Azure security baseline in audit-only mode to enhance security compliance and posture management.
  • Through Change Tracking and Inventory Management, change tracking across services, daemons software, registry, and files in your environment to help you diagnose unwanted changes and raise alerts. Inventory support allows you to query in-guest resources for visibility into installed applications and other configuration items.

By coupling Azure Automanage Machine Best Practices with Azure Arc-enabled servers, you can seamlessly deliver the best of Azure management to servers anywhere. Try it today at https://aka.ms/ArcOnboard!  

Updated Apr 19, 2023
Version 1.0
  • Hi Aurnov,

     

    Why is the focus on connecting to Log Analyitcs Workspace & Azure Automation Account?
    Update management via Azure Automation Account is marked as "Legacy solutions" via Log Analytics and the official announcement is that Log Analytics will be terminated 31 August 2024 (We're retiring the Log Analytics agent in Azure Monitor on 31 August 2024 | Azure updates | Microsoft Azure).

     

    If this was released towards Azure Monitor Agent, Update Management Center (Preview) and VMInsights via Azure Monitor Agent (Preview) i would be exited. I can't help but feel that your working on integrating things that are End of Life within a year... When also the things available today can easily be done with existing Azure Policys (which also gives us a proper statuses).

  • CorjanDeVos's avatar
    CorjanDeVos
    Copper Contributor

    TrasmusenLindberg be aware, Log Analytics is not go to be terminated, its only the Log Analytics Agent what is terminated and replaced by the AMA agent. Further the functionality within the Log Analytics Workspace stays the same