Augmenting Azure Advisor Cost Recommendations for Automated Continuous Optimization – Part 3
This is the third post of a series dedicated to the implementation of automated Continuous Optimization with Azure Advisor Cost recommendations. For a contextualization of the solution here described, please read the introductory post for an overview of the solution and also the second post for the details and deployment of the main solution components.Get Azure Reservations and Savings Plans Insights with the Azure Optimization Engine
When adopting Azure commitments, customers face typically two types of challenges: 1)Estimating the quantities or amount to commit for – e.g., how many VM Reservations of a given size and region, what Saving Plan hourly commitment, and for how long? and 2)Reviewing how effective and efficient commitments have been – e.g., which resources have been leveraging a specific commitment, is a commitment fully consumed, how many savings have been achieved over a period?The Azure Optimization Engine (AOE) provides you with reporting that complements Azure-native tooling for your Azure commitment purchase decision and review processes. This article covers the several AOE Workbooks available for this purpose.Estimating Azure Diagnostics Cost
Azure resource logging (with Azure Diagnostics) is recommended as part of the Operational Excellence and Security pillars of the Well Architected Framework. Furthermore, you’ll also increase your Azure Secure Score, as enabling auditing and logging is one of the assessed controls of your security posture. This blog post helps you estimate the cost of enabling Azure Diagnostics at scale.Test your Patches! A Staged Patching Solution with Azure Update Manager
A common challenge faced by most enterprise organizations who, hopefully, automate their operating systems patching cycles is to ensure that only the Windows and Linux packages updates that were tested in dev/test pre-production environments reach production machines. This article is for those readers who have been implementing automated, scheduled patching with Azure Update Manager and now want to put into practice a staged patching solution following good patching reliability practices.Azure Identities and Roles Governance Dashboard At Your Fingertips
I am writing about Azure Identities and Roles and how the Azure Optimization Engine can help you gain better visibility about your Azure users and applications as well as the roles they own both in Azure and Microsoft Entra.I built a solution that periodically exports to Log Analytics all Microsoft Entra identities (users, groups, and applications) and the roles they own in Azure and Microsoft Entra. With this information available in an easily queryable repository, we can build an interesting Azure Monitor WorkbookDeploying Microsoft Defender for Servers in Network-Restricted Environments
Microsoft Defender for Servers requires the deployment of several agents to achieve its multiple protection capabilities. As many of our customers run their Windows/Linux server environments without direct Internet outbound connectivity, there is the need for guidance on how to successfully deploy Defender for Servers with such restrictions. This article aims thus to bring additional clarity by summarizing all the considerations that must be taken when deploying each Defender for Servers component in network-restricted environments.How to Allocate Azure Monitor Logs Ingestion Costs by Resource Tag
Azure Monitor Logs has also become an important cost driver for many Azure customers and being able to allocate or split those costs across the right cost centers in the organization is a pressing need most customers have. This is especially relevant for customers who centralize as much as possible their Log Analytics workspaces, following Microsoft’s recommended best practices. The question this article answers is: how can we sort out which logs belong to which cost center in a simple manner?How to Remove at Scale the Azure Diagnostics Extension and its Storage Data
Hello, dear readers! Here is Hélder Pinto again, now writing about a topic that came out of my experience in one of my customers, who decided to stop using the Azure Diagnostics Extension in their virtual machine estate but had a massive challenge: how to remove the extension across 1000s of VMs and be sure that the diagnostics data was removed from Azure Storage and, by the way, save more than 10K euros per month? Let’s see how we did it.Augmenting Azure Advisor Cost Recommendations for Automated Continuous Optimization – Part 1
Hereis Helder Pinto, Customer Engineer at Microsoft,presentingthe first post of a series dedicated totheimplementation ofautomatedContinuous Optimizationwith Azure Advisor Cost recommendations. This post described how Azure Advisor Cost recommendations can be augmented with a fit score generated with the help of Azure Resource Graph, Automation and Log Analytics.
