Use Change Tracking to monitor file deployment

Photo by Ilya Pavlov / Unsplash Change Tracking is a versatile feature that allows to monitor changes on a system (both Windows and Linux). Change tracking covers software installation, changes to services, daemons, Registry and the file system. This is available for both cloud based (Azure, AWS, GCP), on-premises and service provider hosted systems (given network connectivity to Azure).…

Inventory VMs with PowerShell DSC and Log Analytics

Photo by Matt Artz / Unsplash In many scenarios there is the requirement to enrich or lookup data with meta information from the infrastructure. In this scenario a file with machine, location and other meta information was placed during deployment on the VM for both Azure and AWS.…

Install Azure PowerShell Cmdlets through proxy

Photo by rawpixel / Unsplash When setting up Azure File Sync one of the requirements is to have the Azure PowerShell Cmdlets (AzureRM) installed. Many customers have proxies deployed which control internet egress. Many of these also use authentication to secure internet access.…

Publish to social with Logic Apps

Photo by rawpixel / Unsplash I like to share on LinkedIn and asked myself why I’m not sharing the articles I write for my blog. The you-just-have-to-do-it factor, plain laziness and lack of time are the primary reasons why I have not posted links to LinkedIn so far.…

Azure Security Center per-hour billing

Photo by rawpixel / Unsplash Currently billing for Azure Security Center is reported on a per-node, per-month basis. Starting July 1st 2018 this reporting will be changed to per-node, per-hour to achieve more granularity in billing. Billing is still pro-rated thus you’ll only pay for the time a node was actually using the service.…

Azure Active Directory Login for Ubuntu VMs in preview

Centralized integration with an identity provider is a common ask. It provides increased security and removes the reliance on out-of-band managed user accounts. It is now possible to configure Azure Active Directory login for Ubuntu-based VMs (16.04 LTS & 17.10) through the Device Flow authentication process.…

Azure Monitor Container Health Public Preview

Photo by frank mckenna / Unsplash Monitoring the container infrastructure which is running your applications is important. With the emergence of managed Kubernetes such as Aure Container Service (AKS) this becomes more tricky as part of the infrastructure is managed by somebody else.…