To stay up to date on news regarding Azure Management services, this summary is released monthly, allowing you to have an overview of the main new features of the month. In this article you will find the announcements, summarized, accompanied by the necessary references to be able to carry out further investigations.
The following diagram shows the different areas related to management, which are covered in this series of articles:
Monitor
Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor for SAP solutions
Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions is now available. It is a solution for customers running SAP applications in a Microsoft Azure environment and allows end-to-end monitoring. With Azure Monitor for SAP, customers can centrally collect end-to-end telemetry data from SAP NetWeaver, database, Linux Pacemaker clusters in high availability and Linux operating systems. The solution Azure Monitor for SAP can be configured with no infrastructure to implement and maintain for customers. Some new features of Azure Monitor for SAP include SAP Landscape Monitor, which provides a single destination to understand the health of the entire SAP landscape, and SAP Insights (preview), which allows you to easily identify the root cause of SAP application availability or performance issues. Furthermore, Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions offers Transport Layer Security and new CPU performance alert templates, memory and disk I/O, plus many other features. With the release of this release, the version of Azure Monitor for SAP solutions (Classic) will be collected by 31 may.
Availability of the Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus
Prometheus, the open-source project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, is considered the de-facto standard when it comes to monitoring containerized workloads. Running Prometheus in self-managed mode is often a great solution for smaller implementations, but scaling it to handle enterprise workloads can be a challenge.
Azure Monitor's fully managed service for Prometheus offers the best of what we like about the open-source ecosystem, while automating complex tasks such as scaling, high availability and long-term data retention. It is available as a standalone feature of Azure Monitor or as an integrated component of Container Insights, Azure Monitor Alerts and Azure Managed Grafana.
Azure Monitor Managed Service for Prometheus for Kubernetes enabled for Azure Arc (preview)
The Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus extends support for monitoring Kubernetes clusters managed by Azure Arc. The Azure Arc-enabled Azure Monitor for Prometheus on Kubernetes managed service allows customers to monitor their Kubernetes clusters running anywhere and maintains the same functionality as monitoring Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
Azure Monitor Agent: support for CIS and SELinux hardening
The AMA has introduced support for hardening standards for CIS and SELinux. For SELinux, AMA works by activating a signed built-in policy. Through CIS, AMA supports select distros, also available on the Azure Marketplace.
Alert support for Azure Data Explorer (preview)
Azure Monitor alerts let you monitor Azure and application telemetry to quickly identify issues affecting various services. More specifically, Azure Monitor log alert rules allow you to set up periodic log telemetry queries to identify potential problems and receive notifications or trigger actions.
Until now, these alert rules supported querying Log Analytics and Application Insights data. Now Microsoft is introducing support for querying Azure Data Explorer tables as well (ADX) and to merge data between these data sources into a single query.
Cost optimization with transformations on Log Analytics for troubleshooting of Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB now supports transformations on Log Analytics workspaces. To help reduce costs when you enable Log Analytics to troubleshoot Cosmos DB resources, transformations have been introduced. These transformations in the Log Analytics workspace allow you to filter columns, reduce the number of results returned and create new columns before the data is sent to the destination.
Configure
Azure Automation
Support for Python runbooks 3.8
Azure Automation has introduced support for Python runbooks 3.8. This feature allows you to create and run Python runbooks 3.8 for orchestrating the management tasks of hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Govern
Azure Cost Management
Updates related toMicrosoft Cost Management
Microsoft is constantly looking for new methodologies to improve Microsoft Cost Management, the solution to provide greater visibility into where costs are accumulating in the cloud, identify and prevent incorrect spending patterns and optimize costs . Inthis article some of the latest improvements and updates regarding this solution are reported.
Alert to optimize reservation purchases
Azure Reservations can provide cost savings by committing to annual or three-year plans. However, sometimes reservations can remain unused or underused, resulting in financial losses. As a user of a billing account or a reservation, it is possible to examine the percentage of use of the reservations purchased in the Azure portal, but important changes may be missed. Enabling alerts on the use of reservations, solves the problem by receiving email notifications whenever any of the reservations have low usage. This allows for timely intervention and optimization of reservation purchases to achieve maximum cost efficiency.
Secure
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
New features, bug fixes and deprecated features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Microsoft Defender for Cloud development is constantly evolving and improvements are being made on an ongoing basis. To stay up to date on the latest developments, Microsoft updates this page, this provides information about new features, bug fixes and deprecated features. In particular, this month the main news concern:
- new alerts in Defender for the Key Vault;
- support encrypted disks in AWS for agentless scanning;
- inclusion of new AWS Regions;
- changes to identity recommendations;
- new recommendations of Defender for DevOps to include Azure DevOps scan results;
- release of the Vulnerability Assessment of containers based on Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management (MDVM) in Defender CSPM.
Protect
Azure Backup
Azure Backup Server V4
The V4 version of Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS) has been released and introduces the following improvements:
- Workload support: Azure Backup Server V4 supports installation on Windows Server 2022 using SQL Server 2022 come database MABS. Furthermore, adds support for backup of virtual machines running on Azure Stack HCI 22H2 and VMware 8.0, as well as Windows Server backup 2022 and SQL Server 2022.
- Performance: Azure Backup Server V4 adds the ability to select and restore individual files/folders from online recovery points for Hyper-V and Azure Stack HCI virtual machines running Windows Server, without having to download the entire restore point. MABS V4 also adds support for parallel restores and features more parallel online backup jobs.
- Security: with Azure Backup Server V4 you can use private endpoints to send backups to the Recovery Services vault.
Azure Backup Reports: support for more workloads
Azure Backup Reports now includes support for other workloads: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Servers, Azure Blobs and Azure Disks. Thanks to this update it is now possible to enable the logging of metadata related to the backup (such as job, backup item, policy, usage) for these workloads and retain these records for a customizable period of time depending on compliance and audit requirements. This way you can take advantage of the reporting views, already provided natively by the Backup Reports solution, to view information about protected items corresponding to these workloads.
Soft deletion of recovery points for Azure Backup (preview)
Azure Backup's soft delete feature now supports soft deletion of recovery points. This feature allows you to recover data from recovery points that may have been deleted as a result of backup policy changes. Soft deleting recovery points allows you to keep these recovery points for an additional duration, based on the retention specified for soft delete in the vault settings.
Support for confidential virtual machines using Customer Managed Keys (private preview)
Azure Backup is introducing support for backup of operating system disk encrypted confidential VMs, done using customer managed keys.
Azure Site Recovery
New Update Rollup
For Azure Site Recovery was released theUpdate Rollup 67 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.
Migrate
Azure Migrate
New Azure Migrate releases and features
Azure Migrate is the service in Azure that includes a large portfolio of tools that you can use, through a guided experience, to address effectively the most common migration scenarios. To stay up-to-date on the latest developments in the solution, please consult this page, that provides information about new releases and features. In particular, this month the main news concerns the discovery and assessment of SQL Server.
Azure Database Migration
Database Migration Service Pack for Oracle (preview)
The Database Migration Service Pack for Oracle is a collection of four extensions that provide a complete solution to modernize Oracle workloads and migrate them to databases in the Azure environment. This extension pack offers several benefits, including in-depth end-to-end assessments, correct sizing of Azure resources, code conversion, remediation planning and near real-time data migration in Azure environment (see next paragraph).
Data Migration for Oracle (preview)
The Data Migration for Oracle extension is a powerful tool that allows you to easily migrate Oracle databases to the Azure platform. This solution offers a seamless migration experience, from the source Oracle database to the target platform (SQL), using Azure Database Migration Service. The extension offers both offline and online data migration for critical databases, ensuring minimal downtime for the migration process.
Evaluation of Azure
To test for free and evaluate the services provided by Azure you can access this page.
