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…
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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…
The AZ-500 is a great certification if you work with security and compliance. In this article I'm outlining my experiences in taking this exam online from my home office, as well as free official Microsoft documentation around the areas you'll be tested on.
I spend much time with Microsoft Azure. Architecture and Design, Solution Architecture, Development, Security, Operations, and more. The extensions below can serve both Developers, Administrators, and anyone in between. In this post, we're looking at some of my favorite Visual Studio Code extensions for working with Azure in various ways. Perhaps you can find some new favorites yourself. Share your favorites in the comments below! Azure AccountThis extension lets you sign in to your subscription and manage aspects of it within Visual Studio Code. This extension is beneficial and productive when working with development subscriptions. I don't use it for…
In recent years, I have built and operated distributed cloud systems. With these systems comes various challenges. A key thing I've learned is to keep a close eye on metrics and insights, to learn how our applications are behaving at scale. This post will be about how to make use of Azure Application Insights to learn about performance and execution issues in Azure Functions, and ultimately in Azure App Services. We will take a look at these things: Use cases. Some favorites from my professional experiences.Favorite KQL (Kusto Query Language) queries. Querying the telemetry and logs for insightful data.…
There are numerous ways to secure and audit your Azure Key Vault setup and usage. In 2019, I wrote Who accessed my Azure Key Vault?, which is still relevant. In this article, I want to talk about how to set up automatic notifications when something change related to your secrets. Events in Key VaultsBefore we drill into the steps to get this done, I want to talk about events in general, and things we might want to think about before we dive in. What events can we subscribe to? The Azure Key Vault uses EventGrid for events. The currently supported…