Hello Folks,
Guess who's back? Back Again, Guess who's back? Tell a friend….
No, it’s not the Slim Shady… This week Anthony Bartolo (@Wirelesslife) is back behind the desk to help me round up the news from around the mothership for all things Azure as it relates to IT and Operations.
We will be covering Microsoft Certification for Students, New Reporting Functionality for Device Control, and Windows Defender Firewall, Metrics, and alerts support in Azure Container Apps, and finally, Azure Monitoring Agent supports custom and IIS logs.
So here we go… Join us online on YouTube? (Live at 10 am eastern time zone) or catch the replay below.
Students, kick-start your tech career with Microsoft Certification!
We all know that students are the future. They are the ones that will bring forth the innovations of tomorrow. To that end, Microsoft wants to help them achieve more, so we’re making certifications, and the resources to learn, prepare, and get certified, free to all eligible students, starting with fundamentals certifications. The program includes the following certification exams
- AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals
- DP-900: Microsoft Azure Data Fundamentals
- AI-900: Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals
- SC-900: Microsoft Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals
- PL-900: Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals
- MB-910: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fundamentals (CRM)
- MB-920: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fundamentals (ERP)
- MS-900: Microsoft 365 Fundamentals
If you are interested or if you know a student that may benefit from this please pass it on. You can find more details in the following article.
New Reporting Functionality for Device Control and Windows Defender Firewall
Do you struggle to see what is happening in your environment? Do you need to access multiple tools and reports to gain insight into the behavior and activity of your device? If so, the new Endpoint reporting capabilities within the Microsoft 365 Defender portal are for you. These capabilities include among other new reports which can be found on the Reports page in the Endpoints node of the Microsoft 365 Defender portal:
- Device Control Report
- Windows Firewall Report?
In this day and age of constant vigilance against attacks and intrusion knowing what’s going on is so important. The Device Control Report is designed to show the activity and usage of external devices.
- Audit events: shows the number of audit events that occur when external media is connected.
- Policy event: shows the number of policy events that occur when a device control policy is triggered
The firewall report allows administrators to view host firewall reports in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal. This feature enables you to view Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Server 2019, and Windows Server 2022 firewall reporting from a centralized location.
Take control of your environment. Find out more in the announcement article.
Metrics and alerts support in Azure Container Apps
This one is a public preview, However, more and more ITPros and Operation folks need to be able to deploy and manage applications and microservices using serverless containers. Getting insight into these apps has been challenging, but now Azure Monitor provides visibility into the activity of running container apps with support for metrics and alerts.
You can use the Metrics Explorer to see the CPU, memory, network activity, and requests your container apps are using, set up alerts on metric thresholds or Log Analytics queries.
There are several tutorials to take advantage of Azure monitor, Check these out!
- Introduction to Azure Monitor
- Analyze your Azure infrastructure by using Azure Monitor logs
- Azure Monitor best practices
Azure Monitoring Agent supports custom and IIS logs
This is also a preview. However, we included it because I’ve been asked many times (more than I could count) about the process to ingest non-standard logs into Log Analytics since many applications log information to text files instead of standard logging services such as Windows Event log or Syslog.
This can easily increase the visibility you need into the applications you are trusted with keeping running. I highly suggest you take a look at the procedure to ingest text and IIS logs with Azure Monitor agent
MS Learn Module of the Week
This week considering we mentioned Azure Monitor a fair bit we thought it would be a good idea to cover AZ-305: Design identity, governance, and monitor solutions.
This is a learning path as opposed to a single module. It’s very important and it will help you prepare for Exam AZ-305: Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions.
By the end of this module, you will be able to:
- Design and recommend governance solutions.
- Design and recommend authentication and authorization solutions.
- Design and recommend logging and monitoring solutions.
Thanks for joining us for this week’s AZUpdate episode.
Feel free to comment or reach out with any questions in the comments below or join us on our discord server.
Cheers!
Pierre