Public Preview Refresh Announcement - Site Manager 

 

Introduction: 

Modern industrial environments—such as factories, manufacturing plants, and distributed infrastructure sites— and retail environments are increasingly hybrid and edge-driven. These sites often run Azure Arc-enabled resources (servers, VMs, Kubernetes clusters, IoT assets) alongside on-prem systems. Managing them at scale introduces unique challenges: Complexity of Distributed Environments, Operational Risk and Downtime, Governance at Scale and Unified Observability. 

We’re excited to announce the Public Preview Refresh of Azure ARC Site Manager, a powerful solution designed to streamline site configuration and lifecycle observability and management for modern edge and cloud environments. After months of feedback during preview, Site Manager is now ready for production use, delivering enterprise-grade reliability and enhanced capabilities. 

Site Manager addresses the challenges in managing Azure Edge resources by providing a single pane of glass that aggregates security, alerts, updates and connectivity status across all sites; enabling policy-driven compliance and consistent monitoring; and ensuring streamlined operations, improved reliability, and simplified management at scale. 

 

Key features of Site Manager 

 

1. Flexibility of Site Scope with Service Groups 

Site Manager enables customers to create sites using flexible scopes— Resource Groups, Subscriptions, and Service Groups. The Service Group scope allows organizations to logically group resources across multiple resource groups and subscriptions, such that they reflect real-world operations, making it easier to manage distributed environments, apply consistent policies, and streamline workflows across hybrid and edge deployments. The result is improved scalability, governance, and operational efficiency. 

 

 

 

 

2. Hierarchical Site Organization - a representation of Business Organization 

Site Manager supports multi-level site hierarchy, including parent sites and subsites, for better representation of physical or logical locations. This hierarchy improves navigation and enables views for distributed infrastructure.  

 

Site Manager supports creating sites that mirror an organization’s hierarchical structure, such as Regions, Business Units, Factories, Stores etc. This alignment makes it easier for customers to manage resources in a way that reflects their operational reality, enabling clear visibility and streamlined views across distributed teams and locations. 

 

 

3. Aggregated Monitoring and Insights 

Site Manager offers a single pane of glass for monitoring distributed environments. It aggregates Connectivity status, Updates, Alerts and Security status for all resources within a site, enabling quick identification of issues across the hierarchy, efficient prioritization and reduced operational complexity. 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Site Configurations 

Site Manager helps define configurations—such as network settings and secrets management—at the site level and reuse them across deployments. This ensures consistency and reduces operational overhead for large-scale environments.  

 

The configurations can also be reused across partner solutions like workload orchestration and Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP). This approach ensures consistency, accelerates deployments, and reduces manual effort, delivering a more integrated and efficient operational experience across hybrid and edge environments. 

 

Architecture & Workflow: 

Azure Arc Site Manager is a cloud-native service within the Azure Arc suite that empowers customers to manage and monitor their on-premises infrastructure at scale. Its architecture streamlines status aggregation by unifying connectivity, security baseline, alerts, and update data from diverse resource types into a single schema. This aggregated data is surfaced through an extension resource, enabling the Azure portal and other clients to retrieve summary views from a centralized location. 

Built on Azure Resource Manager, Site Manager benefits from fine-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), ensuring secure and scoped operations across sites. Management actions—such as creating, updating, or querying Arc sites—can be performed through familiar client tools including SDKs, CLI, PowerShell, Terraform, or directly via the Azure portal, offering flexibility and consistency across environments. 

 

 

 

 

Important Details & Limitations: 

Azure Resource Supported: Currently, site manager supports the following Azure resources with the following capabilities: 

 

  

 

Site manager only provides status aggregation for the supported resource types. Site manager doesn't manage resources of other types that exist in the resource group or subscription, but those resources continue to function normally otherwise. 

  

Regions and Availability: Site manager supports resources that exist in supported regions, with a few exceptions. For the following regions, connectivity and update status aren't supported for Arc-enabled machines or Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters: Brazil South, UAE North, South Africa North 

 

Feedback and Engagement 

We’d love to hear your feedback! As you try out Site Manager, please share your experiences, questions, and suggestions. You can leave a comment below this blog post – our team will be actively monitoring and responding to comments throughout the preview. Let us know what worked well, what could be improved, and any features you’d love to see in the future. Your insights are incredibly valuable to us and will help shape the product as we progress toward General Availability. 

If you encounter any issues or have urgent feedback, you can also engage with us through the following channels: 

• Please fill up the form at SMfeedback for feedback 

• Contact your Microsoft account representative or support channel and mention “Site Manager Public Preview Refresh” – they can route your feedback to us as well. 

• Occasionally, we may reach out to select customers for deeper feedback sessions or to participate in user research. If you’re interested in that, please mention it in your comment or forum post. 

We truly consider our users as co-creators of the product.  

 

Learn More 

To help you get started and dive deeper into workload orchestration, we’ve prepared a set of resources: 

• Site Manager Documentation – What is Azure Arc site manager (preview) - Azure Arc | Microsoft Learn 

• CLI Reference – Command reference: Detailed documentation of all site manager CLI commands with examples. Az.Site Module | Microsoft Learn 

  

Conclusion: 

We’re thrilled for you to explore Site Manager and see how it can transform your unified observability strategy at scale. This Public Preview Refresh is a major step towards aggregated status monitoring and site management at edge.