Understanding the data archiving options – Developing Business Continuity
Many organizations have a requirement to hold some data for longer periods of time. This may be for compliance reasons or simply for long-term record retention. Although backup solutions do offer long-term retention options, for archival purposes Azure Storage offers a specific archiving tier. We covered the storage tiers in Chapter 9, Exploring Storage Solutions, …
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Understanding Cosmos DB backups – Developing Business Continuity
Azure Cosmos DB, as a managed service, also manages your backups, and by default provides a default level of frequency and retention. Backups are managed through the Backup & Restore view of your Cosmos DB and are configured for the entire account. The options are relatively straightforward, as we can see in the following screenshot: …
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Understanding recovery plans – Developing Business Continuity
Using recovery plans allows you to have far greater control over what is failed over and when. Using this mechanism, you can have more direct control over the timing of failovers for individual services. Typically, you would group applications into a recovery plan; for example, if you have a web application consisting of a VM …
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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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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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Understanding logs and storage options – Designing for Logging and Monitoring
In the previous chapter, we explored the options for enabling solutions to be highly available and implementing automatic redundancy to ensure that our systems are always running and healthy. In this chapter, we begin Section 5, Operations and Monitoring, by looking at how we ensure we are always aware of what is happening to our …
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