Explore Azure-native, few-click onboarding for efficient in-guest change and inventory management across hybrid and multi-cloud environments with Azure Arc, enhancing your adaptive cloud strategy seamlessly.
Overview
Azure Change Tracking & Inventory service enhances auditing and governance for in-guest operations by monitoring changes and providing detailed inventory logs for servers across Azure, on-premises, and other cloud environments.
a) 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, who made them, enabling you to quickly detect configuration drifts or unauthorized changes.
b) Inventory:
- Collects and maintains an updated list of installed software, operating system details, and other server configurations in linked LA workspace
- Helps create an overview of system assets, which is useful for compliance, audits, and proactive maintenance.
Latest enhancements focus to optimize change management scenarios at the data plane layer, specifically for on-premises or other cloud environments servers. These improvements streamline the Change Tracking & Inventory onboarding process to these servers enabled with Azure Arc via Azure native experience, enabling faster adoption and extending the benefits of Azure to hybrid IT ecosystems.
Additionally, a clear migration path is now available for Azure Arc servers configured with the retired Log Analytics agent version of Change Tracking to the Azure Monitoring Agent (AMA), ensuring smooth transition and better integration in the Azure ecosystem.
What’s new?
Here is the summary of the latest improvements –
a) Single VM portal onboarding from “Azure Arc” single machine view
b) At-scale portal onboarding from “Azure Arc Machines” listing view
c) Single VM migration to Change Tracking & Inventory with AMA from “Azure Arc” single machine view
d) At-scale VM migration to Change Tracking & Inventory with AMA from “Azure Automation” account view
How to get started?
Single VM portal onboarding from “Azure Arc” single machine view
- Sign in to Azure Portal. Search and select “Machines - Azure Arc”
- Select the target Arc enabled Azure machine. On the Machines view, select “Change Tracking” under “Operations” from left side TOC.
- Configure the required Log Analytics workspace and click “Enable” to deploy Change Tracking & Inventory configuration
At-scale portal onboarding from “Azure Arc Machines” listing view
- Sign in to Azure Portal. Search and select “Machines - Azure Arc”
- Multi select Connected Arc enabled machines from “Machines” view. Click on “Enable Services (Preview)”
- Check the “Eligibility” criteria for your machines and fix issues that do not allow you to enable Change Tracking & Inventory. Afterwards, click “Edit” under Configuration to select and save LA workspace to be linked for data collection. Click “Next” to review your configuration.
- Click “Enable” to initiate deployment.
Single VM migration to Change Tracking & Inventory with AMA from “Azure Arc” single machine view
- Sign in to Azure Portal. Search and select “Machines-Azure Arc”
- Select the specific Arc machine with Change Tracking V1 enabled that needs to be migrated to Change Tracking V2.
- Select “Migrate to Change Tracking with AMA” and in the “Configure with Azure monitor agent”, provide the resource id in the “Log analytics workspace” and select “Migrate” to initiate the deployment.
At-scale VM migration to Change Tracking & Inventory with AMA from “Azure Automation” account view
- Sign in to Azure portal and select your Automation account.
- Under “Configuration Management”, select “Change tracking” and then select “Configure with AMA”.
3. On the “Onboarding to Change Tracking with Azure Monitoring” page, you can view your automation account and list of both Azure and Azure Arc machines currently using Log Analytics and ready to be migrated to Azure Monitoring Agent of Change Tracking and inventory.
4. On the “Assess virtual machines” tab, select the machines and then select “Next”.
5. On “Assign workspace” tab, assign a new Log Analytics workspace resource ID to which the settings of AMA based solution should be stored and select “Next”.
5. On Review tab, you can review the machines that are being onboarded and the new workspace.
6. Select Migrate to initiate the deployment.
You can check out our complete documentation to get more details. We would love to hear feedback on these new enhancements from you.
Microsoft
