Understanding recovery solutions – Developing Business Continuity

In the last chapter, we started the operations and monitoring topic by looking at logging and monitoring. In this chapter, we’ll explore another important subject – the ability to recover from a complete outage. Azure provides a range of recovery solutions that offer different features; these include traditional backup and restore functionality for VMs and …

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Using cost management and reporting – Designing for Logging and Monitoring

Using a cloud platform such as Azure provides great flexibility in costs; that is, you only pay for exactly what you need. However, with such a flexible pricing model, costs could easily spiral out of control, resulting in bill shock. Luckily, Azure provides you with a number of tools to help keep an eye on …

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Azure Sentinel – Designing for Logging and Monitoring

Azure Sentinel brings together all your logs from all sources, via the Log Analytics workspace, to correlate and search for threats. Sentinel uses connectors to integrate with Microsoft 365, Active Directory, and many third-party vendors such as Cisco, Carbon Black, and F5 networks. By combining information from many different sources, an attack can be tracked …

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Understanding security and compliance – Designing for Logging and Monitoring

Security and compliance are important factors in all organizations. As we move our solutions to the cloud, we need to ensure that the resources we build do not expose data to the public network. In addition, many organizations define governance policies that must be adhered to; sometimes these are aligned to regulatory compliance, and sometimes …

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Log Analytics workspaces – Designing for Logging and Monitoring

In this chapter, we have seen how logs and metrics from Azure resources and VMs can be directed to a Log Analytics workspace. Having logs in a Log Analytics workspace provides a few benefits. First, logs can be retained for longer than 90 days. Second, logs can be more easily filtered using a query language …

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Azure Metrics – Designing for Logging and Monitoring

At the start of the chapter, we said that metrics describe an aspect of a system at a particular point in time and are displayed in numerical values. Typical examples include CPU utilization, disk reads and writes, network usage, and storage capacity or usage. As each service in Azure performs different tasks, the metrics we …

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Understanding deployment options – Designing for Logging and Monitoring

By default, only Azure activity logs and platform metrics are enabled. Sending those logs to a Log Analytics workspace or enabling VM agents must be explicitly done. The VM agents are installed when you activate specific tools, such as VM insights, enabling guest-level monitoring, or enabling Logs in the Azure portal. As we see in …

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VM logging and monitoring – Designing for Logging and Monitoring

Because VMs generate logs as part of the operating system – Windows event logs for Windows servers and syslogs for Linux servers – Microsoft provides agents that must be installed on the VMs. There are four different agents that can be installed on VMs, and each either collects different logs or can send them to …

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