Starting from this month, the series of articles released by our community about what's new in Azure management services is renewed. They will be articles, published on a monthly basis, dedicated exclusively to these topics to have a greater level of depth.
Management refers to the tasks and processes required to better maintain business applications and the resources that support them. Azure offers many strongly related services and tools to provide a comprehensive management experience. These services are not exclusively for Azure resources, but they can potentially also be used for on-premises environments or other public clouds.
The following diagram shows the different areas related to management, which will be covered in this series of articles, in order to stay up to date on these topics and to better deploy and maintain applications and resources.
Monitor
Azure Monitor for containers: support for monitoring the use of GPUs on AKS GPU-enabled node pools
Azure Monitor for containers has introduced the ability to monitor the use of GPUs in Azure Kubernetes Service environments (AKS) with nodes that take advantage of GPUs. They are currently supported as NVIDIA and AMD vendors.
This monitoring functionality can be useful for:
- Check the availability of GPUs on the nodes, the use of the GPU memory and the status of GPU requests by pods.
- View the information collected through the built-in workbook available in the workbook gallery.
- Generate alerts on pod status
Export of alerts and recommendations to other solutions
Azure Security introduces an interesting feature that allows you to send security information generated by your environment to other solutions. This is done through a continuous export mechanism of alerts and recommendations to Azure Event Hubs or to Azure Monitor Log Analytics workspaces. This feature opens up new integration scenarios for Azure Security Center. The functionality is called Continuos Export and is described in detail in this article.
Workflow automation functionality
Azure Security Center includes the ability to have workflows to respond to security incidents. Such processes may include notifications, the initiation of a change management process and the application of specific remediation operations. The recommendation is to automate as many procedures as possible as automation can improve safety by ensuring that the process steps are performed quickly, consistent and according to predefined requirements. The Azure Security Center has been made available the functionality workflow automation. It can be used to automatically trigger the Logic Apps trigger based on security alerts and recommendations. Furthermore, manual trigger execution is available for security alerts and for recommendations that have the quick fix option available.
Integration with Windows Admin Center
It is now possible to include Windows Server systems residing on-premises directly from the Windows Admin Center in Azure Security Center.
Azure Monitor Application Insights: monitors Java applications codeless
The Java Application Monitor is now made possible without making changes to the code, thanks to Azure Monitor Application Insights. In fact, the new Java codeless agent is available in preview. Among the libraries and frameworks supported by the new Java agent we find:
- gRPC.
- Netty/Webflux.
- JMS.
- Cassandra.
- MongoDB.
Retiring the solution for Office 365
For the solution “Azure Monitor Office 365 management (Preview)”, which allows you to send the logs of Office 365 to Azure Monitor Log Analytics is expected to be retired on 30 July 2020. This solution has been replaced by the solution of Office 365 present in Azure Sentinel and the solution “Azure AD reporting and monitoring”. The combination of these two solutions is able to offer a better experience in configuration and in its use.
Azure Monitor for Containers: support for Azure Red Hat OpenShift
Azure Monitor for Containers now also supports in preview the monitor for Kubernetes clusters hosted on Azure Red Hat OpenShift version 4.x & OpenShift versione 4.x.
Azure Monitor Logs: limitations on concurrent queries
To ensure a consistent experience for all users in consulting the Azure Monitor Logs, will be gradually implemented new limits of concurrency. This will help protect yourself from sending too many queries simultaneously, which could potentially overload system resources and compromise responsiveness. These limits are designed to intervene and limit only extreme usage scenarios, but they should not be relevant for the typical use of the solution.
Secure
Azure Security Center
Dynamic compliance packages available
The Azure Security Center regulatory compliance dashboard now includes thedynamic compliance packages to trace further industry and regulatory standards. The dynamic compliance packages can be added at subscription or management group level from the Security Center policy page. After entering a standard or benchmark, this is displayed in the regulatory compliance dashboard with all related data. A summary report will also be available for download for all standards that have been integrated.
Identity recommendations included in Azure Security Center tier free
Security recommendations relating to identity and access have been included in the Azure Security Center tier free. This aspect allows to increase the functionality in the cloud security posture management area for free (CSPM). Before this change, these recommendations were only available in the Azure Security Center Standard tier. Here are some examples of recommendations for identity and access:
- “Multifactor authentication should be enabled on accounts with owner permissions on your subscription.”
- “A maximum of three owners should be designated for your subscription.”
- “Deprecated accounts should be removed from your subscription.”
Protect
Azure Backup
Cross Region Restore (CRR) for Azure virtual machines
Thanks to the introduction of this new feature in Azure Backup, it introduces the ability to start restores at will in a secondary region, making them completely controlled by the customer. To do this, the Recovery Service vault that holds the backups must be set to geographic redundancy; in this way the backup data in the primary region are geographically replicated in the secondary region associated with Azure (paired region).
Azure Files share snapshot management
Azure Backup introduces the ability to create Snapshots of Azure Files share, Daily, weekly, Monthly, and keep them until 10 years.
Support for replacing existing disks for VMs with custom images
Azure Backup introduced support, during the recovery phases, to replace existing disks on virtual machines created with custom images.
SAP HANA backup
In Azure Backup, protection of SAP HANA DBs present in virtual machines is available in all major Azure regions. This functionality allows you to have SAP HANA database protection integrated and without having to provide a specific backup infrastructure. This solution is officially certified by SAP.
Evaluation of Azure
To test for free and evaluate the services provided by Azure you can access this page.
