Azure Management services: what's new in November 2020

In November, Microsoft unveiled several news regarding Azure management services. 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.

The following diagram shows the different areas related to management, which are 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.

Figure 1 – Management services in Azure overview

Monitor

Azure Monitor

New version of the agent for Linux systems

This month, a new version of the Log Analytics agent was released forLinux systems, which includes several improvements and ensures greater stability. Among the main changes is support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, CentOS 8, Ubuntu 20.04 and SLES 15 SP1+, as well as an extension of features for Azure Arc VMs. It also includes a new troubleshooting tool.

Availability in new regions

Azure Log Analytics is now available in the "Brazil Southeast" and "Norway East" regions. It is also available in preview in three new regions: “Germany West Central”, “UAE North”, and “Switzerland West”. To check the availability of the service in all the Azure regions you can consultthis document.

Virtual Machines Guest Health (preview)

The functionality Virtual Machines Guest Health allows you to monitor the health status of the CPU, disk and memory for a virtual machine and allows you to receive alerts for changes. Each monitor measures the health status of a particular component and the three states covered are: Healthy, Warning, and Critical. These states are defined based on the thresholds set by the user for each monitor. The functionality Virtual Machines Guest Health has a hierarchical model “father-son” where the overall integrity of the virtual machine is determined by the integrity of its individual monitors and corresponds to the monitor state “son” having the worst state of integrity.

Configure

Azure Automation

Availability in a new region

Azure Automation is now available in the “Brazil Southeast”. To check the availability of the service in all the Azure regions you can consult this document.

Govern

Azure Policy

Export and management of Azure Policies as code with GitHub

You can now export Azure policies to GitHub directly from the Azure portal, through the “Export definitions”. After exporting, you can use GitHub actions to create custom workflows for deploying policies from GitHub to Azure. For further information you can consult this documentation.

Azure Advisor

New recommendations

Azure Adivisor has added the following recommendations to help improve the reliability and performance of Azure resources.

Reliability:

Latest version of the Azure Connected Machine agent
Do not override host name when configuring Application Gateway

Performance:

Protect

Azure Backup

Soft Delete for SQL Server and SAP HANA in Azure VMs

Azure Backup officially released thesoft delete also with regard to the SQL Server and SAP HANA protection on board Azure virtual machines. Soft delete is a security feature that allows you to protect your backups even after you delete it. Thanks toSoft delete, in the event that a backup is removed accidentally or for malicious actions, you are guaranteed that the backup data is still maintained for 14 days from the cancellation date. This feature, that doesn't include any additional costs, allows you to recover any backups removed within the retention period.

News in SAP HANA protection

Azure Backup makes it easy to back up and restore SAP HANA databases running on Azure virtual machines and is BackInt certified by SAP. With regard to the protection of SAP HANA, the following innovations have been introduced:

Support for SAP HANA incremental database backups (preview).
Azure Backup's SAP HANA backup uses a pre-registration script to create a HANA user to perform backup and restore operations, which has suffered significant updates about the permissions required by the user who is used to perform backups.

Long term protection for Azure PostgreSQL

Azure Backup provides the ability to keep Azure Database backups for PostgreSQL up to 10 years. To consult the advanced protection features of Azure PostgreSQL databases you can consult this article.

Azure Resource Manager template support for backing up Azure file shares

Azure Backup introduced the ability to configure backup protection for Azure file shares by using the Azure Resource Manager declarative template (ARM). With this new option, you can enable backup of Azure file shares through a specific JSON file that can be deployed through the Azure portal, Azure Powershell or with azure command-line interface.

Azure Site Recovery

DR for Azure VM: increased the maximum disk size

Azure Site Recovery now enables Disaster Recovery scenarios for virtual machines in Azure with managed disks up to 32 TB, replicated in a secondary region.

Migrate

Azure Migrate

PowerShell support for the Server Migrate tool

In Azure Migrate, thanks to the addition of a new PowerShell-based management interface for the Server Migrate tool, you can configure and manage server replication and migration to Azure using Azure PowerShell cmdlets. This allows you to perform migrations in a repeatable and automated way, being able to obtain greater scalability and speed in the migration processes.