For some time, Microsoft has started a process that led to bundle several features and settings of OMS Log Analytics in the Azure portal. Recently it was officially announced that the OMS portal will be deprecated, in favour of the Azure Portal. This article will examine aspects related to this change and what you should know to avoid being caught unprepared.
The choice to leave the OMS portal, in favour of the Azure Portal, was made in order to provide a unique user experience to monitor and manage the systems, regardless of their location (on-premises or on Azure). Thanks to the Azure portal you can browse and manage all Azure services and soon you will also have complete control over OMS Log Analytics. The expectation is that the gap currently present between the two portals is finally filled by the end of summer and short Microsoft will announce the date for the final disposal of the OMS portal.
Figure 1 - Notifications in the OMS portal
Figure 2 – Overview of Log Analytics in the Azure Portal
What does this change?
The disposal of the OMS portal, in addition to a noticeable change in user experience, also entails a change in the use of Log Analytics to aspects reported below.
Management of alerts
Instead of using the Alert management solution of Log Analytics you must use Azure Monitor, in addition to allowing you to monitor all Azure borne resources, also holds the "alerting" engine for the entire cloud platform. The article "The extension of Log Analytics Alerts in Azure Monitor"introduces the new management of the Alerts in Log Analytics and the benefits introduced by this evolution.
Access Permissions for the portal
Access management in the Azure Portal, based on role-based access control (RBAC), is definitely more flexible and powerful than the one in the OMS portal. Azure provides these two default built-in user roles for Log Analytics:
- Log Analytics Reader
- Log Analytics Contributor
For details regarding access management of Log Analytics from the Azure portal you can consult this documentation. Starting from 25 June will start the automatic conversion process, during which each user or security group present in the OMS portal will be reported with the appropriate role in the Azure Portal, according to the following association:
Figure 3 - Association between OMS portal permissions and Azure roles
Mobile App
As for the portal OMS, even the OMS mobile app will be deprecated. In its place you can access to the Azure portal directly from the mobile browser, waiting for future extensions of the Azure Mobile App. To receive notifications on mobile devices, when alerts are generated, you can use Azure Action Groups.
Application Insights Connector
TheApplication Insights Connector is used to return the data of Application Insights inside the workspace of Log Analytics. This connector is no longer needed and will be deprecated, from November of this year, given that the same functionality can be achieved using cross-resource queries.
Azure Network Security Group Analytics
The solution Azure Network Security Group Analytics will be replaced by Traffic Analytics, accessible only from the Azure Portal. For more details on this new tool you can refer to the article "How to monitor network activities in Azure with Traffic Analytics"
Current gap in the Azure portal
To date it is imposed the use the OMS portal, for who uses the following solutions, as they are not totally usable in the Azure Portal:
- Windows Analytics Solutions (Upgrade Readiness, Device Health, and Update Compliance)
- DNS Analytics
- Surface Hub
Microsoft is working to update this solutions and make them available using the Azure Portal. To stay up to date on changes about this you can refer to the page Azure Updates.
Considerations
To manage Log Analytics should be used the Azure portal since today, which enables new tools, to benefit from the better experience offered, and to take advantage of the portal's features, as the dashboards, searches, and tagging for resource management. The OMS portal will be disposed soon, but it can still be required if you need to use the solutions not yet compatible (above reported), waiting for their upcoming update that will make them fully functioning with the Azure Portal.
