G'day everyone. I'm James Lee and welcome to Azure This Week. Where it's our job to go through the
pages upon pages of Microsoft announcements and service updates, and distill all of that down into
the top news for your easy consumption. And I tell you, it's lucky for Lars that he's on holidays
because there were just so many updates for me to trawl through in his absence. Just, uh,
so, so many updates. Well, maybe not that many updates. It does look like Lars's prediction
about the lack of updates was right. But I have picked a few that I think you'll enjoy.
We'll take a look at a new exam sandbox from Microsoft that I think you might find pretty
handy if you're going to sit an Azure exam. A price reduction for Confidential Compute,
and an update to Azure Monitor, which allows you to monitor your monitoring within Azure Monitor.
All of that coming up in Azure This Week.
If you're gonna sit your first Azure exam, it's absolutely normal to be a little bit scared
or at least curious about what the experience will be like. To help with this, Microsoft's new
exam sandbox is a great way to get familiar with the look and feel of a Microsoft exam,
from start to finish. You can experience different question types, as well as the question review and
feedback functionality, all without the pressure of whether you'll pass or fail.
Now, I actually did fail my exam in the exam sandbox, but I'm sure you'll have better luck
than me. Let me know how you go in the comments below. So whether you're new to Microsoft exams
or just looking at a refresher before you sit your next one, it's pretty handy stuff.
You don't need to search very far these days to find news stories of some data breach, exploit,
or other security concern. So knowing about the different tools you can use to secure your
solutions is becoming increasingly important. Well with Microsoft recently announcing a price
reduction for Azure's Confidential Compute, this might be another security tool you could
add to your arsenal. You might have heard about protecting data in transit and data at rest. Well
with Confidential Compute we can also now protect data in use. Protecting data in use is really
talking about data that's stored in memory, or being processed. And to help protect that data,
Microsoft Azure provides some special virtual machine families with added technologies that
can help securely isolate your data. And with this change in pricing, you can now get access to these
VMs at a 33% lower price. So if you're looking to process some secret information in the cloud,
you might wanna check this out. Now, one thing that shouldn't be kept a secret
is a new feature for monitoring your monitoring within Azure Monitoring.
As Lars predicted, there haven't actually been a lot of changes or announcements so far this year.
So I bring you an update from December 21 about an Azure Monitor feature that you might have just
missed over the holidays. Azure Monitor has had a lot of name changes over the years: Log Analytics,
OMS, Monitoring Solutions, and more. It can be really quite a bit annoying to be honest,
but it's actually because there have been so many improvements and capabilities added over time,
just like this one. Azure Monitor has become such a powerful monitoring solution. It helps
you to monitor apps and operating systems and resources, both inside and outside of Azure.
So you can capture lots and lots of monitoring data, but how do you deal with all of this data?
You do so with an Azure Monitor feature known as Log Analytics. Sorry, no, not Log Analytics. It's
actually now called Azure Monitor Log Queries. Well, Log Queries uses a powerful query language
to help you search through and analyze all of that log data that you're capturing.
But one thing that was missing was the ability to track and monitor the log queries itself.
So as Microsoft puts it, with this update you can now track when a query was run, who ran it, what
tool was used, the query text, and performance statistics describing the query's execution.
So this can really help you with both the performance and the security of your log queries.
Well folks that's a wrap for Azure This Week, the show powered by the same cloud hamster wheels that
power Microsoft global data centers. Be sure to check out next week's episode, which will
be brought to you by the wonderful, the wizardly, Wayne Hoggett. Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.