Announcing Public Preview for Essential Machine Management
Managing servers and VMs across Azure, on premises, and multi-cloud environments often means turning on core capabilities—monitoring, updates, inventory, and configuration—through separate setup experiences. We’ve heard feedback that this makes it harder to get visibility into machine state and take actions. We’re excited to announce the public preview of Essential Machine Management experience within Compute Infrastructure Hub—a new entry point in Azure that streamlines onboarding for machines at scale and enables basic management capabilities. Start once at subscription scope, get a clear view of what’s turned on, and move from setup to operations faster across your Azure and cloud and hybrid estate. What is Essential Machine Management? Essential Machine Management is a centralized onboarding experience that helps customers enroll their machines into a set of selected cloud-native management services from Azure in a simple, scalable way, Instead of enabling monitoring, updates, inventory, and configuration independently per machine, Essential Machine Management allows you to enroll entire subscriptions at once, including both Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Arc–enabled servers. These services are pre-configured with best practices, enabling customers with out-of-the-box value right away. Once enrolled, current and future machines in the selected subscriptions are automatically onboarded to the enabled management services, helping ensure consistent visibility and operational coverage from day one. What management capabilities are enabled? Using Essential Machine Management, you can quickly onboard machines to multiple Azure management capabilities, including: Monitoring insights and recommended alerts for machine health and performance Azure Update Manager to help keep machines secure and compliant Change tracking and inventory for visibility and auditability Machine configuration for managing in-machine configuration, compliance and security Azure Security baseline policy is a set of tailored rules to assess your machine's security posture These services help keep your infrastructure secure and healthy. How much does it cost? Azure VMs: For Azure Virtual Machines only, capabilities enabled by Essential Machine Management are provided at no additional charge. Azure Arc-enabled servers: For Azure Arc-enabled servers with Windows Server Software Assurance, Windows Server PayGo, and Windows Server Extended Security Updates, capabilities enabled by Essential Machine Management are provided at no additional charge. For all other Arc-enabled servers, Essential Machine Management will be priced at $9 per server per month once billing is enabled. See more details here. Getting started If you manage Azure VMs or Arc-enabled servers and are looking to simplify how you onboard and manage machines at scale, Essential Machine Management feature is now available for you to try in public preview. Check out the preview in the Azure Portal under Compute infrastructure --> Monitoring + Operations --> Essential Machine Management (preview): Check out Essential Machine Management now and reach out to machineenrollmentsupport@microsoft.com for any feedback or support. Learn more about Essential Machine Management here.
Azure Update Manager to support CIS hardened images among other images
What’s coming in by first week of August: Azure Update Manager will add support for 35 CIS hardened images. This is the first time that Update Management product in Azure is supporting CIS hardened images. Apart from CIS hardened images, Azure Update Manager will also add support for 59 other images to unblock Automation Update Management migrations to Azure Update Manager. What’s coming in September: After this release, another batch of 30 images will be added support for. Please refer to the article below to check the details of which images will be supported. Below 35 CIS images will be supported by Azure Update Manager by first week of August. Please note Publisher for all these images is center-for-internet-security-inc. Offer Plan cis-windows-server cis-windows-server2016-l1-gen1 cis-windows-server2019-l1-gen1 cis-windows-server2019-l1-gen2 cis-windows-server2019-l2-gen1 cis-windows-server2022-l1-gen2 cis-windows-server2022-l2-gen2 cis-windows-server2022-l1-gen1 cis-windows-server-2022-l1 cis-windows-server-2022-l1 cis-windows-server-2022-l1-gen2 cis-windows-server-2022-l2 cis-windows-server-2022-l2 cis-windows-server-2022-l2-gen2 cis-windows-server-2019-v1-0-0-l1 cis-ws2019-l1 cis-windows-server-2019-v1-0-0-l2 cis-ws2019-l2 cis-windows-server-2016-v1-0-0-l1 cis--l1 cis-windows-server-2016-v1-0-0-l2 cis-ws2016-l2 cis-windows-server-2012-r2-v2-2-1-l2 cis-ws2012-r2-l2 cis-rhel9-l1 cis-rhel9-l1 cis-rhel9-l1-gen2 cis-rhel-8-l1 cis-rhel-8-l2 cis-rhel8-l2 cis-rhel-7-l2 cis-rhel7-l2 cis-rhel cis-redhat7-l1-gen1 cis-redhat8-l1-gen1 cis-redhat8-l2-gen1 cis-redhat9-l1-gen1 cis-redhat9-l1-gen2 cis-ubuntu-linux-2204-l1 cis-ubuntu-linux-2204-l1 cis-ubuntu-linux-2204-l1-gen2 cis-ubuntu-linux-2004-l1 cis-ubuntu2004-l1 cis-ubuntu-linux-1804-l1 cis-ubuntu1804-l1 cis-ubuntu cis-ubuntu1804-l1 cis-ubuntulinux2004-l1-gen1 cis-ubuntulinux2204-l1-gen1 cis-ubuntulinux2204-l1-gen2 cis-oracle-linux-8-l1 cis-oracle8-l1 Apart from CIS hardened images, below are the other 59 images which will be supported by Azure Update Manager by first week of August: Publisher Offer Plan almalinux almalinux-x86_64 8_7-gen2 belindaczsro1588885355210 belvmsrv01 belvmsrv003 cloudera cloudera-centos-os 7_5 cloud-infrastructure-services rds-farm-2019 rds-farm-2019 cloud-infrastructure-services ad-dc-2019 ad-dc-2019 cloud-infrastructure-services sftp-2016 sftp-2016 cloud-infrastructure-services ad-dc-2016 ad-dc-2016 cloud-infrastructure-services hpc2019-windows-server-2019 hpc2019-windows-server-2019 cloud-infrastructure-services dns-ubuntu-2004 dns-ubuntu-2004 cloud-infrastructure-services servercore-2019 servercore-2019 cloud-infrastructure-services ad-dc-2022 ad-dc-2022 cloud-infrastructure-services squid-ubuntu-2004 squid-ubuntu-2004 cognosys sql-server-2016-sp2-std-win2016-debug-utilities sql-server-2016-sp2-std-win2016-debug-utilities esri arcgis-enterprise byol-108 byol-109 byol-111 byol-1081 byol-1091 esri arcgis-enterprise-106 byol-1061 esri arcgis-enterprise-107 byol-1071 esri pro-byol pro-byol-29 filemagellc filemage-gateway-vm-win filemage-gateway-vm-win-001 filemage-gateway-vm-win-002 github github-enterprise github-enterprise matillion matillion matillion-etl-for-snowflake microsoft-ads windows-data-science-vm windows2016 windows2016byol microsoft-dsvm ubuntu-1804 1804-gen2 netapp netapp-oncommand-cloud-manager occm-byol nginxinc nginx-plus-ent-v1 nginx-plus-ent-centos7 ntegralinc1586961136942 ntg_oracle_8_7 ntg_oracle_8_7 procomputers almalinux-8-7 almalinux-8-7 procomputers rhel-8-2 rhel-8-2 RedHat rhel 8_9 redhat rhel-byos rhel-lvm79 rhel-lvm79-gen2 rhel-lvm8 rhel-lvm82-gen2 rhel-lvm83 rhel-lvm84 rhel-lvm84-gen2 rhel-lvm85-gen2 rhel-lvm86 rhel-lvm86-gen2 rhel-lvm87-gen2 rhel-raw76 redhat rhel 8.1 redhat rhel-sap 7.4 redhat rhel-sap 7.7 redhat rhel 89-gen2 southrivertech1586314123192 tn-ent-payg Tnentpayg southrivertech1586314123192 tn-sftp-payg Tnsftppayg suse sles-sap-15-sp2-byos gen2 suse sles-15-sp5 gen2 talend talend_re_image tlnd_re thorntechnologiesllc sftpgateway Sftpgateway veeam office365backup veeamoffice365backup veeam veeam-backup-replication veeam-backup-replication-v11 zscaler zscaler-private-access zpa-con-azure Below images will be supported in September: Publisher Offer Plan aod win2019azpolicy win2019azpolicy belindaczsro1588885355210 belvmsrv03 belvmsrv001 center-for-internet-security-inc cis-rhel-7-v2-2-0-l1 cis-rhel7-l1 center-for-internet-security-inc cis-rhel-7-stig cis-rhel-7-stig center-for-internet-security-inc cis-win-2016-stig cis-win-2016-stig center-for-internet-security-inc cis-windows-server-2012-r2-v2-2-1-l1 cis-ws2012-r2-l1 cloudrichness rockey_linux_image rockylinux86 Credativ Debian 8 microsoftdynamicsnav dynamicsnav 2017 microsoftwindowsserver windowsserver-hub 2012-r2-datacenter-hub 2016-datacenter-hub MicrosoftWindowsServer WindowsServer-HUB 2016-Datacenter-HUB ntegralinc1586961136942 ntg_cbl_mariner_2 ntg_cbl_mariner_2_gen2 openvpn openvpnas access_server_byol rapid7 nexpose-scan-engine nexpose-scan-engine rapid7 rapid7-vm-console rapid7-vm-console suse sles 12-sp3 suse sles-15-sp1-basic gen1 suse sles-15-sp2-basic gen1 suse sles-15-sp3-basic gen1 gen2 suse sles-15-sp4-basic gen2 suse sles-sap 12-sp3 15 gen2-15 suse sles-sap-byos 15 suse SLES-SAP-BYOS 15 suse sles-sap-15-sp1-byos gen1 Tenable tenablecorenessus tenablecorenessusbyol
GA: Enhanced Audit in Azure Security Baseline for Linux
We’re thrilled to announce the General Availability (GA) of the Enhanced Azure Security Baseline for Linux—a major milestone in cloud-native security and compliance. This release brings powerful, audit-only capabilities to over 1.6 million Linux devices across all Azure regions, helping enterprise customers and IT administrators monitor and maintain secure configurations at scale. What Is the Azure Security Baseline for Linux? The Azure Security Baseline for Linux is a set of pre-configured security recommendations delivered through Azure Policy and Azure Machine Configuration. It enables organizations to continuously audit Linux virtual machines and Arc-enabled servers against industry-standard benchmarks—without enforcing changes or triggering auto-remediation. This GA release focuses on enhanced audit capabilities, giving teams deep visibility into configuration drift and compliance gaps across their Linux estate. For our remediation experience, there is a limited public preview available here: What is the Azure security baseline for Linux? | Microsoft Learn Why Enhanced Audit Matters In today’s hybrid environments, maintaining compliance across diverse Linux distributions is a challenge. The enhanced audit mode provides: Granular insights into each configuration check Industry aligned benchmark for standardized security posture Detailed rule-level reporting with evidence and context Scalable deployment across Azure and Arc-enabled machines Whether you're preparing for an audit, hardening your infrastructure, or simply tracking configuration drift, enhanced audit gives you the clarity and control you need—without enforcing changes. Key Features at GA ✅ Broad Linux Distribution Support 📘 Full distro list: Supported Client Types 🔍 Industry-Aligned Audit Checks The baseline audits over 200+ security controls per machine, aligned to industry benchmarks such as CIS. These checks cover: OS hardening Network and firewall configuration SSH and remote access settings Logging and auditing Kernel parameters and system services Each finding includes a description and the actual configuration state—making it easy to understand and act on. 🌐 Hybrid Cloud Coverage The baseline works across: Azure virtual machines Arc-enabled servers (on-premises or other clouds) This means you can apply a consistent compliance standard across your entire Linux estate—whether it’s in Azure, on-prem, or multi-cloud. 🧠 Powered by Azure OSConfig The audit engine is built on the open-source Azure OSConfig framework, which performs Linux-native checks with minimal performance impact. OSConfig is modular, transparent, and optimized for scale—giving you confidence in the accuracy of audit results. 📊 Enterprise-Scale Reporting Audit results are surfaced in: Azure Policy compliance dashboard Azure Resource Graph Explorer Microsoft Defender for Cloud (Recommendations view) You can query, export, and visualize compliance data across thousands of machines—making it easy to track progress and share insights with stakeholders. 💰 Cost There’s no premium SKU or license required to use the audit capabilities with charges only applying to the Azure Arc managed workloads hosted on-premises or other CSP environments—making it easy to adopt across your environment. How to Get Started Review the Quickstart Guide 📘 Quickstart: Audit Azure Security Baseline for Linux Assign the Built-In Policy Search for “Linux machines should meet requirements for the Azure compute security baseline” in Azure Policy and assign it to your desired scope. Monitor Compliance Use Azure Policy and Resource Graph to track audit results and identify non-compliant machines. Plan Remediation While this release does not include auto-remediation, the detailed audit findings make it easy to plan manual or scripted fixes. Final Thoughts This GA release marks a major step forward in securing Linux workloads at scale. With enhanced audit now available, enterprise teams can: Improve visibility into Linux security posture Align with industry benchmarks Streamline compliance reporting Reduce risk across cloud and hybrid environmentsUpgrading your server and client TLS protocol just got easier using Automanage Machine Configuration
Ensuring secure communication protocols across server environments has been a clear requirement for IT admins, operators, and developers for the past two decades. What wasn’t clear was how to set a desired communication protocol and maintain this at scale, until now. Tech CommunityEverything New in Azure Governance @ Build 2025
You've come to the right place if you're looking for everything happening with Azure Governance at Microsoft Build, May 19-22, 2025. Azure Governance is an ecosystem of neatly integrated services that provide the ability to ensure speed and control across your cloud environment. From enforcing rules in your cloud environment to querying the state of your resources at-scale, Azure Governance services keep your resources secure and compliant with corporate standards. Join us at Microsoft Build! #MSBuild Session: "Unlock developer agility with a well governed environment" - Thurs, May 22 @ 8:30 AM PDT In a world where app and env requirements are ever changing, maintaining control can be a moving target. Come learn how to empower your developers to achieve more, without compromising on security, compliance, or operational best practices through Azure Governance products. In this session we'll be discussing newly released features within Azure Policy, dive deep into Policy as code, and announce a new grouping construct called Service groups designed to optimize cross subscription management Join the session here: https://aka.ms/AzGovBuild25 Sign up for our #MSBuild Product Roundtable Sessions! Are you going to attend Build 2025 in person in Seattle? If the answer is Yes, Azure product teams would like to invite you to the following Customer Feedback Roundtable sessions at Microsoft Build 2025. Sign up here to join our roundtable sessions: https://aka.ms/AzGovRoundtable. This is a unique opportunity for you to share your insights and help shape the future of Azure. These roundtables will be filled on a first come, first serve basis, so don't miss your chance to sign up now! If you are not attending Build in person, no problem! If you are interested, we would like to invite you to participate in future online feedback sessions. New Releases @ Build 2025 The Azure Governance team is excited to share all the following new features across our product portfolio. For each of the features, you will find an accompanying announcement with scenario details, documentation and blog posts to follow along! Jump to section (New!) Azure Service Groups Azure Policy Azure Machine Configuration Azure Resource Graph (ARG) Azure Resource Manager (ARM) (New!) Azure Service Groups Azure Service Groups - Public Preview A Service Group (SG) is a new grouping structure in Azure that supports flexible grouping of cross-subscription resources and multiple hierarchies of groups. Service Groups provide a unified view and management capabilities, enabling: Low Privilege Management: Service Groups are designed to operate with minimal permissions, ensuring that users can manage resources without needing excessive access rights and appealing to multiple personas. Flexible Cross-Subscription Grouping: Azure resources and scopes, from anywhere in the tenant, can become members of one or multiple service groups. Varying Hierarchies: Service Groups can be self-nested providing the ability to have multiple hierarchy structures of resource containers. Data Aggregation & Views: Aggregate data from resources across subscriptions for practical workloads. View application health (via Health Model) and important data values centered around your wanted perspective. You can reach our team by email at mailto:azureservicegroups@microsoft.com for any questions or comments! TechCommunity Blog: https://aka.ms/servicegroupspreview MS Learn Documentation: http://aka.ms/servicegroups Azure Policy New Features currently in Private Preview Many of the Azure Policy enhancements, including user-based exemptions, caller-type based enforcement (e.g., type user or service principal) and IP filtering are currently in private preview and will soon be available to the public. Stay tuned! Azure Machine Configuration Linux SSH Posture Control Policy - Generally Available We are excited to announce additional built-in capabilities for Linux management scenarios through Azure policy and Machine Configuration. Through new built-in policies, you can manage your SSH configuration settings declaratively at-scale. SSH Posture Control enables you to use the familiar workflows of Azure Policy and Machine Configuration to: Ensure compliance with standards in your industry or organization Reduce attack surface of remote management features Ensure consistent setup across your fleet for security and productivity SSH Posture Control also provides detailed Reasons describing how compliance or non-compliance was determined. These Reasons help you to document compliance for auditors with confidence and evidence. They also enable you to take action when non-compliance is observed. MS Learn Documentation: What is SSH Posture Control? | Microsoft Learn Windows Server 2025 Audit Policy (powered by OSConfig) - Generally Available You can now deploy the Windows Server 2025 security baseline to your environment and ensures that desired security measures are in place, providing a comprehensive and standardized security framework. The Windows Server 2025 baseline includes over 300 security settings to ensure that it meets industry-standard security requirements. It also provides co-management support for both on-premises and Azure Arc-connected devices. The OSConfig tool is a security configuration stack that uses a scenario-based approach to deliver and apply the desired security measures for your environment. MS Learn documentation: Configure security baselines for Windows Server 2025 | Microsoft Learn Onboarding Arc Machines at-scale to Machine Config in Azure Portal - Public Preview With the integration of Machine Configuration audit policies in the Arc at-scale onboarding experience, you can now quickly deploy audit policies to get a deeper look at the security posture of your Arc-enabled servers. Whether you're seeking to test Machine Configuration on an Arc machine or looking to deploy a policy across a broader scope of machines, your deployment workflow just got incredibly easy with this new integration. Azure Resource Graph (ARG) ARG GET/LIST API - Private Preview Now in Private Preview is the Azure Resource Graph GET/LIST API, a highly scalable, fast, and performant alternative to existing control plane GET and List API calls within the Azure ecosystem. This API allows you to mitigate issues related to throttling, such as performance degradation and failed requests offering a 10X higher Read throttling quota to callers, ensuring faster and more efficient read operations for your critical cloud native workload. Contact argpms@microsoft.com to join the private preview program! Azure Resource Graph Copilot – Generally Available With the release of the Azure Resource Graph (ARG) skill within Copilot, customers can access the ARG query skill through Azure Portal or Github Copilot. Questions about resource governance like “how many Linux VMs do I own” will be sent to the ARG Skill. With this release, customers can easily turn natural language questions into ARG queries. ARG Copilot helps users create queries to quickly surface insights about resources and simplify operational investigations. MS Learn documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/copilot/get-information-resource-graph Azure Resource Manager (ARM) EU Data Boundary enabled by ARM - Generally Available Going beyond Azure's existing data storage commitments, you can now store and process EU Data in the EU by leveraging Azure data boundaries enabled by Azure Resource Manager. With Azure Resource Manager, you can ensure that in-scope, global Azure metadata data, including EUII, EUPI, Customer Content, and Support Data, are routed, processed, and stored entirely within EU data boundary countries and datacenter locations. This builds on Azure's existing regional metadata privacy commitments and helps our European customers achieve greater control over data locality to meet regulatory, compliance, and sovereignty requirements. MS Learn Documentation: What is the EU Data Boundary? - Microsoft Privacy | Microsoft Learn Stay Updated Keep in touch with Azure Governance products, announcements, and key scenarios. Bookmark the Azure Governance Tech Community Blog, then follow us @AzureGovernance on X (previously known as Twitter) Share Product feedback/ideas with us here- Azure Governance · Community For questions, you can reach us at: Azure Policy: policypm@microsoft.com Azure Resource Graph: argpms@microsoft.com
Change Tracking & Inventory: Enhanced discovery & onboarding to manage in-guest actions efficiently
Overview Azure Change Tracking & Inventory (CTI) service enhances auditing and governance for in-guest operations by monitoring changes and providing detailed inventory logs for servers across Azure and Arc connected on-premises, and other cloud environments. 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, enabling you to quickly detect configuration drifts or unauthorized changes. Inventory: Collects and maintains an updated list of installed software, operating system details, and other server configurations in linked Log analytics workspace Helps create an overview of system assets, which is useful for compliance, audits, and proactive maintenance. What’s New? In this edition of the blogpost, we are capturing Change Tracking & Inventory (CTI) enhancements focusing to optimize day 0 and day N experience with CTI. Here are the key aspects – [Day 0 experience] Change Tracking & Inventory Center a) Streamlined portal discovery of Change Tracking & Inventory center from Azure Portal – b) At-scale multi subscription level machines’ view to review & configure CTI onboarding in “Machines” blade of Change Tracking & Inventory center c) Identify & conduct multi-VM onboarding from Machines blade. Select Enabled = “No” & Machines Status = “Connected”, “VM running” to identify the machines eligible for CTI onboarding, click “Enable Change Tracking & Inventory” to initiate at-scale onboarding to CTI d) Policy based tools to conduct at-scale onboarding via CTI center [Day N experience] Streamlined navigation across inventory & changes data a) For the machines configured with CTI, you can now navigate across the metadata logs for supported data types with clickable cards both across single machine view and CTI center Ex: Linux Daemons Additionally, you can refer to documentation to learn more. Please feel free to reach out to us on changeinventoryteam@microsoft.com for any queries or feedback.Now Open Source: nxtools, managing Linux IaC just got simpler using Automanage machine configuration
We are "nxcited" to announce the release of nxtools, an opensource collection of class-based DSC resources for commonly used Linux / Unix modules and built-in Machine Configuration packages for customers. Azure Automanage Machine Configuration (previously known as Azure Policy Guest Configuration) enables configuration as code allowing you to audit and configure OS, app, and workload level settings at scale, both for machines running in Azure and hybrid Azure Arc-enabled servers.
