Accelerate designing, troubleshooting & securing your network with Gen-AI powered tools, now GA.
We are thrilled to announce the general availability of Azure Networking skills in Copilot, an extension of Copilot in Azure and Security Copilot designed to enhance cloud networking experience. Azure Networking Copilot is set to transform how organizations design, operate, and optimize their Azure Network by providing contextualized responses tailored to networking-specific scenarios and using your network topology.
Azure virtual network terminal access point (TAP) public preview announcement
What is virtual network TAP? Virtual network TAP allows customers continuously stream virtual machine network traffic to a network packet collector or analytics tool. Many security and performance monitoring tools rely on packet-level insights that are difficult to access in cloud environments. Virtual network TAP bridges this gap by integrating with our industry partners to offer: Enhanced security and threat detection: Security teams can inspect full packet data in real-time to detect and respond to potential threats. Performance monitoring and troubleshooting: Operations teams can analyze live traffic patterns to identify bottlenecks, troubleshoot latency issues, and optimize application performance. Regulatory compliance: Organizations subject to compliance frameworks such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) can use virtual network TAP to capture network activity for auditing and forensic investigations. Why use virtual network TAP? Unlike traditional packet capture solutions that require deploying additional agents or network appliances, virtual network TAP leverages Azure's native infrastructure to enable seamless traffic mirroring without complex configurations and without impacting the performance of the virtual machine. A key advantage is that mirrored traffic does not count towards virtual machine’s network limits, ensuring complete visibility without compromising application performance. Additionally, virtual network TAP supports all Azure virtual machine SKU. Deploying virtual network TAP The portal is a convenient way to get started with Azure virtual network TAP. However, if you have a lot of Azure resources and want to automate the setup you may want to use a PowerShell, CLI, or REST API. Add a TAP configuration on a network interface that is attached to a virtual machine deployed in your virtual network. The destination is a virtual network IP address in the same virtual network as the monitored network interface or a peered virtual network. The collector solution for virtual network TAP can be deployed behind an Azure Internal Load balancer for high availability. You can use the same virtual network TAP resource to aggregate traffic from multiple network interfaces in the same or different subscriptions. If the monitored network interfaces are in different subscriptions, the subscriptions must be associated to the same Microsoft Entra tenant. Additionally, the monitored network interfaces and the destination endpoint for aggregating the TAP traffic can be in peered virtual networks in the same region. Partnering with industry leaders to enhance network monitoring in Azure To maximize the value of virtual network TAP, we are proud to collaborate with industry-leading security and network visibility partners. Our partners provide deep packet inspection, analytics, threat detection, and monitoring solutions that seamlessly integrate with virtual network TAP: Network packet brokers Partner Product Gigamon GigaVUE Cloud Suite for Azure Keysight CloudLens Security analytics, network/application performance management Partner Product Darktrace Darktrace /NETWORK Netscout Omnis Cyber Intelligence NDR Corelight Corelight Open NDR Platform LinkShadow LinkShadow NDR Fortinet FortiNDR Cloud FortiGate VM cPacket cPacket Cloud Suite TrendMicro Trend Vision One™ Network Security Extrahop RevealX Bitdefender GravityZone Extended Detection and Response for Network eSentire eSentire MDR Vectra Vectra NDR AttackFence AttackFence NDR Arista Networks Arista NDR See our partner blogs: Bitdefender + Microsoft Virtual Network TAP: Deepening Visibility, Strengthening Security Streamline Traffic Mirroring in the Cloud with Azure Virtual Network Terminal Access Point (TAP) and Keysight Visibility | Keysight Blogs eSentire | Unlocking New Possibilities for Network Monitoring and… LinkShadow Unified Identity, Data, and Network Platform Integrated with Microsoft Virtual Network TAP Extrahop and Microsoft Extend Coverage for Azure Workloads Resources | Announcing cPacket Partnership with Azure virtual network terminal access point (TAP) Gain Network Traffic Visibility with FortiGate and Azure virtual network TAP Get started with virtual network TAP To learn more and get started, visit our website. We look forward to seeing how you leverage virtual network TAP to enhance security, performance, and compliance in your cloud environment. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to refine and expand on our feature set! If you have any questions please reach out to us at azurevnettap@microsoft.com.
New and improved network topology experience in Network Watcher and Azure Monitor Network Insights
Azure Network Watcher provides network monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities to increase observability and actionable insights. Network Watcher supports four main scenarios: Connectivity Monitoring detects packet loss and latency, built-in health metrics and topology visualization help to locate issues, traffic monitoring tracks network communication pattern, and diagnostics suite enables troubleshooting. Efficient management and monitoring of cloud networks is crucial for peak performance, security, and reliability. The blog explains how the new topology experience can help you manage and monitor your cloud network infrastructure with enhanced visualization, simplified monitoring, valuable insights and contextual issue localization capabilities.
Build an Azure Logic App to send an alert when the provisioning state changes for your Azure VWAN
Have you ever thought about monitoring your VWAN provisioning state? In today’s dynamic cloud environment, it’s crucial to have a good monitoring system in place for your Azure resources especially your networking resources. In this blog, I am going to show you step-by-step how to create an Azure Logic App that will notify you whenever the provisioning status of your Azure Virtual WAN changes to another state other than “Succeeded”. Note: As of the time I am writing this blog, Microsoft doesn’t support alerts based on Metrics for Azure Virtual WAN. You can still retrieve information for the components that shape up the Virtual WAN for example, VPN site-site connections, BGP peers, virtual hubs, etc. However, you won’t be able to configure diagnostic logs for virtual WAN at this time. Good news — There’s an alternate way to be alerted via an Azure Logic AppMonitor and troubleshoot Azure & hybrid networks with Azure Network Monitoring
Azure Network Watcher and Network Insights portfolio encompasses an entire suite of tools to visualize, monitor, diagnose, and troubleshoot network issues across Azure and Hybrid cloud environments. The suite enables customers to observe health across resources and networks with comprehensive wide coverage, through a guided and intuitive drilled down experience with Network Insights. Moreover, users can detect and localize connectivity and performance issues across their Azure and Hybrid networks with synthetic monitoring in Connection Monitor. Additionally, Traffic Analytics allows customers to visualize and manage their networks for uncompromised security, compliance issues, and understand the flow of network traffic. Lastly, the Diagnostics suite offers fast troubleshooting with actionable insights, thus effectively assisting in reducing the meantime to resolve and mitigate network issues
