Recently, Microsoft Teams adoption in organizations world-wide has skyrocketed. To keep up with this pace, here's a post about securing the Collaboration Experience, configuring Compliance, and a look at Security options!
In this post: The device, the specs.The pros and cons, after about a month of daily usage.How to: Use it as a main workstation with DeX.How to: Use it as a secondary monitor/screen.Using it with Zwift when I'm riding my road bike indoors.The deviceLet's start with my first impression. Wow. I don't buy a lot of new devices or peripherals. I have a laptop, a tablet, and a phone. I have these devices to stay productive in my working days, and to have what I need when I'm spending casual family-time, too. Using the…
Getting insights into the resources we operate is a crucial part of understanding where we need to improve and what works well. In reality, the insights and telemetry we gather exist in various regions and datacenters. Data sits in multiple subscriptions and different resource groups - even the same application can have numerous Application Insights instances, depending on what type of data and how much we collect. When I want to aggregate and query the logs from various Application Insights instances, I can use KQL in the log query. For example, a distributed set of applications report telemetry in different…
Recently, Microsoft introduced a new option when creating Application Insight instances. A selection to help us choose between the Classic approach, or the modern Workspace-based mode. In the Azure Portal, it can look like this when we create a new Application Insights today: Select the Resource Mode of Application insights when you create a new Application Insights.If you have Application Insights instances that were created some time ago, you may want to upgrade to Workspace-based mode at some point. Note: Classic Application Insights will be retired on in February 2024, which indicates that using Workspace-based Application Insights is the…
Hey friends. Here's a tip from the field. Make use of the auto-healing capabilities in your Azure App Services to increase the reliability of your production workloads. What is auto-heal?The auto-heal capabilities are coming out of the Azure App Service Diagnostics, which I previously wrote about. If you haven't already, please read the article linked above to learn how to discover the Diagnostics area of your App Services. When you're there, you can head on over to the proactive tools. Here you will find the "Auto-Heal" capability. Azure App Service auto-heal capabilities.In this tool, you have a few…
Directly related to Log Analytics and sending entities from C#, I have previously talked about Building Custom Data Collectors for Azure Log Analytics and Log custom application security events in Azure Log Analytics which are ingested and used in Azure Sentinel. I created the LogAnalytics.Client project on GitHub, and recently published a NuGet for anyone to consume. Simply put: It's an easy way to send logs from your applications to Azure Log Analytics. It abstracts away the boring bits, leaving us with a client that accepts any entity (object) with valid properties. A contributing reason why I initially built…
Here's another tip about ensuring a healthy and reliable experience in your Azure App Services. An easy way to increase availability of your apps is to make use of the Health checks. ScenarioIn one of my apps, I have 4 instances by default - and then they scale in and out as needed when the workload requires it. Sometimes, an app service instance becomes faulty. This can happen because of many different reasons, but that's a topic for another post. Let's assume that you have seen intermittent faults happening to your app services - something which doesn't quite resonates with…
Keeping container registries clean and neat is not always an easy task. We have fairly agile release processes, and sometimes we release many images, several times per day across dev- and production environments. Microsoft recently introduced a neat way to automatically purge images based on filters, directly from the Azure CLI. Use casesI saw an immense growth in the Azure Container Registry size. Tags, experimental features, legacy releases, and more - everything we ever pushed to ACR is just sitting there. Most of it is doing nothing. Seeing this, I created a set of utility scripts that could help me…