In October were announced, by Microsoft, a considerable number of news regarding the Azure management services and System Center. Our community, through these articles that are released on a monthly basis, want to provide an overview of the main news of the month, in order to stay up to date on these arguments and have the necessary references for further information.
Azure Log Analytics
Availability in new regions
Azure Log Analytics is now available in the new regions “Switzerland North”, to allow you to collect log and perform related trend analysis on the use of resources.
New option for the pricing model
For Azure Monitor Log Analytics is available from November 1 2019 a new pricing model, allowing you to pay a fixed fee for data ingestion, based on the capacity of the selected tier. The tier start at 100 GB per day and allow you to get a saving of up to 25%, compared to the Pay-As-You-Go cost.
New version of the agent for Linux systems
This month the new agent version of Log Analytics introduces enhancements for Linux systems in particular concerning the installation process and performance. For more information about this, you can access theGitHub official page.
Retention configurable by data type
Azure Monitor Log Analytics introduces the ability to configure data retention, that is, the retention period of the data, for each type of data, instead of having a single retention setting for the entire workspace. The configuration at the time must be made through ARM commands. This new possibility allows for greater flexibility and savings in retention costs from the collated data from October (release date of this functionality). For more details please visit the Microsoft's official documentation.
Changing the saving of data in Service Map in Log Analytics
Data for Service Map, until now saved in custom log tables ServiceMapComputer_CL and ServiceMapProcess_CL will be moved to specific Log Analytics data types. These new tables will be called VMComputer and VMProcess, Inl.
Azure Site Recovery
New Update Rollup
For Azure Site Recovery was released theUpdate Rollup 41 that solves several issues and introduces some improvements. The details and the procedure to follow for the installation can be found in the specific KB.
Update for Windows servicing stack and SHA-2
For the Azure Site Recovery Mobility agent was issued a specific update required to enable Windows servicing stack and SHA-2 support.
Availability in new regions
Azure Site Recovery is now available in “Norway East” and “Norway West, North Dakota”. To check the availability of the service in all the Azure regions you can consult this document.
Azure Backup
Support for disks up to 32 TB
Support for large Managed disks has been announced for Azure Backup, up to 32 TB. For further information you can consultthis article.
System Center Configuration Manager
New releases for the Technical Preview Branch
For Configuration Manager was released the update 1910 that one of the main innovations is the ability to deploy and manage Microsoft Edge. With this integration, you can also easily manage the deployment of new versions of Microsoft Edge from the beta channel (updated every 6 weeks) and the Dev channel (updated weekly).
To check the details of what's included in these updates, 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 service offered by Azure you can access this page, while to try out the various components of System Center you must Access to theEvaluation Center and, after registering, you can start the trial period.
