>> When you're troubleshooting a time-sensitive issue,
you really want the ability to
identify quickly any recent changes.
Now with change history,
you can find exactly what changed in your Azure resources.
Jenny Hunter is here to show us how it works,
today, on Azure Friday.
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>> Hey everyone. Donovan Brown here with
another episode of Azure Friday.
I'm here with Jenny, and she's going to show us how to use change
history to troubleshoot issues in Azure.
So change history.
How do I use this and what does it really good for?
>> Basically, when it comes down to you
and things are breaking in your environment,
the first question is, what's changed?
>> Yeah.
>> Today unfortunately, it can be a really frustrating experience.
So let me go ahead.
Can I give you a showcase of that?
>> Okay.
>> So here's my machine,
let's call it Marketing1.
It's responsible for one of my websites
contoso.com and it is simply dropping resources today.
As a result, I'm dropping customers,
people are getting error pages.
So I want to figure out why this machine
isn't giving me the service it's supposed to be doing.
So I click onto "Activity log" and go through.
I know that I first started getting reports this morning.
So I'm going to look at just the last 24 hours in activity logs.
What I get here is I have a lot of information thrown in my face.
I have a lot of auditing going on in my environment.
So if I'm lucky enough,
I spot this Create or update virtual machine.
So I go to drill down more in that,
and I get this which tells me,
it was either created or updated.
So this gives you a time frame to work with,
but I don't know much else.
So if I'm lucky,
I have a user that I can go and try and
contact them and figure out why this has happened,
but in general, I don't know the results for that.
I don't know if anything even changed or they could have just made
a put call with the API that
had the exact same payload and therefore,
the resource didn't actually change at that time.
>> Got you.
>> So I can be overloaded with
all the different information coming to me from these audit logs.
But now, if I go and take the next step to go into Azure Policy.
From here, I can see I actually became
non-compliant with three different policies.
So I'm going to scroll down into one of them and
deep dive into why this machine might have become non-compliant.
From the non-compliant resource page,
I see that this machine is indeed listed.
The cool thing is now,
from the resource complaints page here and policy,
you get this Change history tab.
>> Okay.
>> By clicking on that, I'm able to see all the times there was
actual content change to the resource.
So this is times that I know for
certain that a property on that resource changed.
>> Right. So this is different from the scenario you
described earlier where there was just a put to the API,
but didn't really change anything,
that'll still show up in the audit log,
but it will not show up here unless something actually changed.
>> Correct. >> Okay.
>> So this helps you really filter down a lot of the noise.
>> Got it.
>> That happens in your environment.
>> Perfect.
>> So like I said,
I know that this problem occurring
this morning and I see that right early this morning,
there's actually a change that was detected.
So by clicking into this,
I'm able to see quickly, before,
and after, of a change that happened in my environment,
where the VM sizes actually modified,
which could affect what resources are available,
but also key component of that is that the machine
gets restarted whenever someone changes the size,
which could affect a lot of high availability
and any applications running on the machine.
>> Absolutely.
>> So this capability provides
a lot of flexibility and helping you to
understand what's going on
your environment and troubleshoot when you get
different tickets or issues coming
out to actually understand what changed in your environment,
so you can take those next steps to do root cause analysis.
>> Yeah. Or very simply, just change it back.
>> Definitely. So the next step on top of this,
we just came out into public preview.
We're actually now out in public preview with our API,
so you can get more freedom and control.
You don't have to have policies on
your resources in order to access this data.
>> Got you.
>> Even better, you actually require
no configuration and no cost
to see what's happening on your resources.
>> Great. Having this available through a rest API,
now allows me to incorporate this data and these policies
and just change information into other parts of my process,
potentially CICD pipeline, I can then go and
create some of this data to see if
the changes have been made the way I want them to be.
>> Exactly.
>> Perfect. So we're learning all about
the new improvements of change history here on Azure Friday.
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