Hello folks
I partnered with the product group and actual IT professionals outside of Microsoft to create a video series where we look at Azure Lighthouse and its benefits from a variety of different perspectives.
If you’ve ever had to deploy, manage, and support a workload or an application in someone else’s subscription you know the problems that come with that territory. Azure Lighthouse can help you. So, stay tuned because today we’ll discuss exactly that with Josep Mascaro from Sage.
Two of the most useful capabilities that Lighthouse provides are:
- View activity data and logs
- Open a support ticket on behalf of the customer.
Let’s look into those more closely.
View activity data and logs
For the customer. If you have delegated a subscription for Azure Lighthouse. You can view Azure Activity log data to see all actions taken by your ISV/MSP and monitor service provider activity.
This gives you full visibility into operations that service providers are performing, along with operations done by users within the customer's own Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tenant.
For more functionality, you can and should create a diagnostic setting to send the Activity log of your resources to one or more of these locations for the following reasons:
- to Azure Monitor Logs for more complex querying and alerting, and longer retention (up to 2 years)
- to Azure Event Hubs to forward outside of Azure
- to Azure Storage for cheaper, long-term archiving
For the ISV the access to the logs in Azure Monitor Logs will enable you to more quickly troubleshoot issues that may have been caused by changes/activities in the subscription. And therefore get to a resolution quicker.
Open a support ticket on behalf of your customer.
Azure enables you to create and manage support requests, also known as support tickets. You can create and manage requests in the Azure portal, which is covered in this article. You can also create and manage requests programmatically, using the Azure support ticket REST API, or by using Azure CLI.
Azure Lighthouse enables you to create that ticket from within the customer’s environment. So they can take advantage of their own support agreement. This also allows you to “bypass” the middleman. No longer do you need to ask the customer to generate a report, collect the logs, send the info to you so you can forward it to the Azure support personnel. You can access all that information and provide it directly to the support person. Saving you and the customer some valuable time.
There are many other benefits to Azure Lighthouse. Next week the third and final episode in this series will cover the reseller perspective. In the meantime, I encourage you to provide feedback and comments below.
Until then!
Cheers
Pierre