Change Tracking & Inventory: Enhanced discovery & onboarding to manage in-guest actions efficiently

Overview

Azure Change Tracking & Inventory (CTI) service enhances auditing and governance for in-guest operations by monitoring changes and providing detailed inventory logs for servers across Azure and Arc connected on-premises, and other cloud environments.

        Change Tracking:

• Monitors changes, including modifications to files, registry keys, software installations, and Windows services or Linux daemons.
• Provides detailed logs of what and when the changes were made, enabling you to quickly detect configuration drifts or unauthorized changes.
  
  Inventory:

• Collects and maintains an updated list of installed software, operating system details, and other server configurations in linked Log analytics workspace
• Helps create an overview of system assets, which is useful for compliance, audits, and proactive maintenance.

What’s New?

In this edition of the blogpost, we are capturing Change Tracking & Inventory (CTI) enhancements focusing to optimize day 0 and day N experience with CTI. Here are the key aspects –

[Day 0 experience] Change Tracking & Inventory Center

a) Streamlined portal discovery of Change Tracking & Inventory center from Azure Portal –

b) At-scale multi subscription level machines’ view to review & configure CTI onboarding in “Machines” blade of Change Tracking & Inventory center

c) Identify & conduct multi-VM onboarding from Machines blade.

•  Select Enabled = “No” & Machines Status = “Connected”, “VM running” to identify the machines eligible for CTI onboarding, click “Enable Change Tracking & Inventory” to initiate at-scale onboarding to CTI

d) Policy based tools to conduct at-scale onboarding via CTI center

[Day N experience] Streamlined navigation across inventory & changes data

a) For the machines configured with CTI, you can now navigate across the metadata logs for supported data types with clickable cards both across single machine view and CTI center

Ex: Linux Daemons

Additionally, you can refer to documentation to learn more. Please feel free to reach out to us on changeinventoryteam@microsoft.com for any queries or feedback.