Azure News as heard on the Need to Know podcast – Episode 154
OMS-ITSM Connector
We are happy to announce that the OMS team has released the public preview of the OMS-ITSM Connector, it’s a bidirectional solution to connect with System Center Service Manager – ServiceNow, Provance and Cherwell ITSM. The IT Service Management Connector integrates your existing IT service management (ITSM) products and services with OMS Log Analytics. The solution provides the OMS users with an option to create incidents, alerts, or events in an ITSM solution, or the other way by importing data such as incidents and change requests from ITSM back into OMS. This solution is now available in all OMS regions and will complement different OMS Solutions like Service Map with data from ITSM systems.
The public preview provides the following capabilities:
- Creation of ITSM work items (like alert, event, incident) in ITSM from OMS alerts and through log search.
- Read incidents and change requests from the ITSM solution and correlate with relevant log data in Log Analytics workspace.
- Centrally monitor and manage work items for ITSM products/services used across the organisation.
- Enable faster troubleshooting by correlating with other management solutions in the Log Analytics workspace.
- Import work items data into Log Analytics and create key performance indicator (KPI) reports. These reports allow customers to identify, assess and act on several important items such as malware assessment.
- Create and view curated dashboards for deeper insights on incidents, change requests and impacted systems.
Public Preview blog Link: More Info.
Azure Container registry general availability
Same as a Windows registry but for containers, it’s a stateful place to store information. As containers are run all over the place in multiple environments, they need a registry just like Windows, now they have one in Azure.
Azure enables cutting edge Virtual Apps, Desktops and Workstations with NVIDIA GRID
Last year we released Azure’s first GPU offerings targeting high-end graphics applications. NV based instances are powered by the NVIDIA GRID virtualisation platform with NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPUs that provide 2048 CUDA cores per GPU and 8GB of GDDR5 memory per GPU. These instances provide over 2x performance increase in graphics-accelerated applications as compared to the previous generations.
If your organisation has a need to run Virtual Apps or Virtual Desktops using solutions like RDS, Citrix XenApp Essentials, VMware Horizon or Workspot, you’re now able to run up to 25 concurrent Remote Desktop Session Hosts users per GPU. Office workers and professionals who don’t require Quadro optimised applications, can finally enjoy virtual desktops with a high-quality user experience that’s optimised for productivity applications. It’s all the performance of a physical PC, where and when you need it. You can now dramatically lower IT operational expense and focus on managing the users instead of PCs.
Sneak Peek – PowerShell in Azure Cloud Shell
At BUILD 2017, we announced the preview of Azure Cloud Shell, which supports the Bash shell. As showcased (at 9:35 min) by Corey Sanders, we are adding PowerShell support to Azure Cloud Shell, which gives you a choice of shell to get work done.
The PowerShell experience will provide the same benefits as the Bash shell in Azure Cloud Shell:
- Get authenticated shell access to Azure from virtually anywhere.
- Use common tools and programming languages in a shell that’s updated and maintained by Microsoft.
- Persist your files across sessions in attached Azure File storage.
Additionally, the PowerShell experience will provide:
- Azure namespace capability to let you easily discover and navigate all Azure resources.
- Interaction with VMs to enable seamless management into the guest VMs.
- Extensible model to import additional cmdlets and ability to run any executable.
Sign-up today to participate in a limited preview of PowerShell in Azure Cloud Shell.
Accelerate GDPR compliance with the Microsoft Cloud
In May 2018, a European privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), is due to take effect. The GDPR imposes new rules on companies, government agencies, non-profits, and other organisations that offer goods and services to people in the European Union (EU), or that collect and analyse data tied to EU residents. The GDPR applies no matter where you are located.
Microsoft has extensive expertise in protecting data, championing privacy, and complying with complex regulations. We believe that the GDPR is an important step forward for clarifying and enabling individual privacy rights. We want to help you focus on your core business while efficiently preparing for the GDPR.
We are committed to GDPR compliance across our cloud services when enforcement begins May 25, 2018, and provide GDPR related assurances in our contractual commitments.
Azure Networking New Features Demo Snapshot
Packet Capture, you select a virtual machine and choose to store the packets in either a storage account of file, you then run a trace. Once you stop the trace, it generates a pcap file which is WireShark. You now get full visibility of your network in Azure.
Marc Kean 