To stay up to date on news about Azure management services and System Center, our community releases this monthly summary, allowing you to have an overview of the main new features of the month. In this article you will find the news, presented in a synthetic way and accompanied with the necessary references to be able to conduct further studies.
Azure Log Analytics
New version Agent for Linux systems
This month the new agent version of Log Analytics for Linux systems introduces improvements concerning the stability and reliability. For more information about this, you can access the GitHub official page.
Availability in new regions
The availability of Azure Log Analytics has been extended for another five new regions: Central US, East US 2, East Asia, West US and South Central US.
Azure Site Recovery
Improvements in the monitor of VMware and physical systems
In the replication scenario of VMware systems and physical machines , the role Process Server acts as replication gateway, then receives replication data, performs an optimization through caching and compression mechanisms, provides encryption and sends them to the storage in the Azure environment. This role is also responsible to make the discovery of virtual machines on VMware systems. There are several factors that may impact on the smooth functioning of this component: high data change rate (churn), network connectivity, bandwidth availability, undersizing of the computing capacity required. In ASR were added different States of health that facilitate troubleshooting for this component. For each alert is also proposed corrective action deemed necessary, in order to better manage this role, essential for the proper functioning of the replication process.
Azure Backup
Network Security Group service tags for Azure Backup
Microsoft announced the ability to use within the Network Security Groups (NSGs) the service tag for Azure Backup. Using the tag AzureBackup it is possible to allow in the NSG outbound access to the Azure Backup service, so you can protect your workloads (SQL Server) on board of the virtual machines, instead of having to manage a whithelist that contains the IP addresses of the service. This is useful, in addition in the presence of the SQL Server workloads to be protected, also to make VM backup via MARS agent.
System Center Configuration Manager
New release for the Technical Preview Branch
For Configuration Manager was released the update 1905 that among the main innovations provides the ability to create application groups to be sent to collection of users or devices into a single deployment. The applications in the group can be installed with a specific order and the group will be displayed in Software Center as a single entity (suite of products).
To verify the details about what's new in this update you can see this document.
Please note that the Technical Preview Branch releases help you to evaluate new features of SCCM and it is recommended to apply these updates only in test environments.
Evaluation of Azure and System Center
To test and evaluate free of charge the services offered by Azure you can access this page, while to try the various System Center components you must access theEvaluation Center and, after registering, you can start the trial period.
