Exploring provisioning options – Scripted Deployments and DevOps Automation
In Chapter 16, Developing Business Continuity, we looked at how to ensure our solutions have adequate backups in the event that the unexpected happens. In this chapter, we continue the operational theme, looking at how we can deploy components into Azure, specifically using scripts, templates, and automation tools. We will begin by exploring what options …
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Understanding backup policies – Developing Business Continuity
A backup policy is used to define different aspects of how you want to back up your workloads, and multiple policies can be created and used. For example, you may want to use one policy for application VMs that don’t change very often, and a separate policy for database VMs, whose data changes continually. Once …
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Understanding the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – Developing Business Continuity
An RPO is often stated alongside an RTO. If you are architecting a solution that performs regular backups of your platform, then you also need to consider how often those backups are taken. This effectively determines your RPO, which is the maximum amount of time that can pass between backups. For example, an RPO of …
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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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Understanding data types and sources – Designing for Logging and Monitoring-2
By default, basic logs and metrics are stored automatically on the platform and you can view up to 30 days of history. These default views also provide basic filtering and monitoring options to get a high-level view of what is happening to your solutions. If you need longer retention of logs or wish to perform …
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Understanding data types and sources – Designing for Logging and Monitoring-1
Monitoring data is largely split into two different types – metrics and logs. Metrics describe an aspect of a system at a particular point in time and are displayed in numerical values. They are capable of supporting near real-time scenarios. Logs are different from metrics. They contain data that is organized into records, with different …
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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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