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- Welcome to Azure Essentials.
- In the next few minutes,
we'll take a look at the built in capabilities
for managing your VMs and resources
once they're running in Azure.
We give you the freedom to manage the needs
of your environment,
with setting your own maintenance windows,
ensuring a holistic, hybrid view across your data center
in Azure, or the many other custom needs that you may have.
Combination of granular controls and a high level
of visibility through powerful native analytics
helps you to configure and maintain your VMs at scale
using robust management tools,
monitor the health and performance of your apps,
infrastructure and network, troubleshoot issues
as they arise with live telemetry,
and optimize resource utilization and manage your costs
in Azure.
So let's start with your VMs.
Once you've created and provisioned them in Azure,
you can get an operational view
of a specific VM in the Azure portal
with information derived directly from the running VM.
From here, you can also perform management operations
against your VMs.
For example, you can take inventory of everything
that's running on the VM, from software, files,
Windows registry and Windows services.
And of course, you can also check on inventory
across all of your VMs by selecting
manage multiple computers.
The good news is, you can also get
the same consistent experience for Linux VMs as well.
Now of course, most operational issues
are caused by changes in the system.
From within your VM, you can identify configuration changes
from files to registry keys, to help you pinpoint
operational issues.
And through change tracking, you can drill into
what's changed in a specific time frame
and investigate the nature of the change.
As before, you can track changes across all of your VMs
with the same manage multiple computers view.
Update management in Azure then allows you to keep current
with recommended updates and to quickly apply them.
You can see and track all missing updates
for both Linux and Windows, and schedule them.
Select which updates you want to deploy,
such as critical updates,
and choose your maintenance window.
Once you start to get more operational insights,
there's a number of things you can do.
For instance, you can build more redundancy
into your environment by leveraging Azure backup
to create a backup of your VMs at a specified time interval.
There also might be other post deployment configuration
steps that you want to perform.
If, for example, you want to configure
a VM for a specific task, one of the best ways
to achieve this is within the Azure portal via Cloud Shell.
Cloud Shell supports two of the most popular scripting
languages, Bash and PowerShell.
Now a huge advantage is that it allows you to bring in
your existing scripts, and run them natively
on your Azure resources, and it persists what you've stored
for Cloud Shell, even as you move between your work stations
and mobile devices.
Alternatively, you can leverage Azure automation
to run tasks on a schedule or to sequence multiple tasks.
You can create your own or choose from a gallery
of existing operational tasks in the form of
graphical runbooks or scripts and execute them
based on your design triggers.
Within the Azure portal, we also give you
an aggregate view to be able to monitor your resources
across applications in your subscription
so that you can see your health
and performance in real time.
You can configure your own custom operational dashboards
within the Azure portal and pin reporting tails
across your Azure resources that are important to you.
Additionally, as your monitor enables monitoring
of your Azure services and resources,
and allows you to query additional metrics
such as the health of host services in your region.
Comprises of a highly scalable
and reliable telemetry pipeline
that creates metrics and logs, health and service events
from your Azure services.
You can also monitor change activity
by setting up near real time alerting,
including who should be notified on the team,
and your preferred notification method.
Next, Azure Log Analytics creates logs
of all activity going on in your environment.
This is critical for troubleshooting issues
and maintaining an accurate audit trail for compliance.
You can query these logs and get insights across
your workloads and systems to ensure availability
and meet desired performance levels.
By selecting the advanced log analytics capability,
then enables you to do more sophisticated queering
using a query language which is similar to sequel.
All of these alerts and outputs
can be integrated with your
preferred IT management solutions
and existing processes.
So we've looked at some of the core capabilities
for management, monitoring and troubleshooting,
and to add to that, you've got a number of options
to help you optimize resource consumption,
and how you configure your app environments within Azure.
Azure advisor analyzes the usage patents of your resources
and how you set them up, and then offers personalized
recommendations to help you avoid potential issues.
It can, for example, help ensure business continuity
of your mission critical apps, by detecting deployments
containing single points of failure,
and resources that aren't configured in the SLAs,
with high availability recommendations.
You can also use it to help you
get the most of Azure resources.
For example, you can see on the utilize VMs,
the potential cost saving for each VM,
from there, choose which to resize or shut down.
To manage costs across all your Azure subscriptions,
the free Azure cost management can then help you track
VM sizing, and corresponding resources
to give you recommendations for optimizing costs.
Lastly, as additional resources are spun up,
Azure policy allows you to enforce specific policies
for second resources.
Think of these as environment blueprints
where you have certain policies that you want to enforce
or certain rules or compliance
for each new resource created.
Where this becomes powerful is in the ability
to set up initiatives, which comprise multiple policies
that you can enforce and track.
For example, requiring minimal OS versions
and security controls, or policy scoping VM discs
and processor attributes.
You can define your own policy
or customize policies based on built in policy definitions.
Also in the compliance blade,
you can see whether your resources are compliant
with the initiatives and policies that you've set.
All of this ensures that your resources meet
your utilization cost, compliance, all of the stated needs.
So that was a quick overview of managing your VMs
and resources once they're running in Azure.
It's worth noting that beyond being able to integrate alerts
with your existing IT management solutions,
you can also setup the monitoring
and troubleshooting technologies in Azure
to supervise events in your data center,
the hybrid management.
You can explore deeper learning experiences
at the link shown, and of course,
keep checking back on Azure Essentials for more topics.
Thanks for watching.
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