Microsoft TSP (Technology Solutions Professional)
This blog post was recognised on this podcast and here’s the audio snippet (below) where they specifically talked about it. Thanks guys! Microsoft has the second biggest network in the world behind the internet Microsoft Cloud Show Podcast – Episode 281 Want to understand more about Azure’s global WAN and Microsoft’s network backbone? A recent 2018 Public…
This blog post is based on 3 separate asks from 3 separate customers about adding value for their Azure subscriptions. They came to be and said “Marc, I would like to devise a scheme where at 7pm every night, all Dev/Test VMs can be shut down to save money and the business owners have the…
Read more Save Money with Azure, intelligent shutdown of VMs
Announced recently, the new Extended Security Updates which gives you 3 years free extended security updates past the end of Extended Support for: Windows Server 2008 Windows Server 2008 R2 SQL Server 2008 SQL Server 2008 R2 To make use of the Extended Security Updates offer for the versions of software above, you just need to either: Migrate your…
Read more Extended Security Updates | Windows Server 2008/R2 or SQL Server 2008/R2
Azure Disks, there’s a LOT of them. Many of my customers have VMs deployed with various different storage options, the question always comes up, cost & value. I wanted to post a blog to shine some light on my experience of me talking to customers, some tips and tricks. This blog compares Azure storage to…
At the time of this publication, the new Azure Virtual WAN is currently in public preview. Similar to Office 365, Microsoft have brought Azure one set closer to the customer by using 130+ edge nodes. It means that your branch sites far away from Azure datacneters, can connect into an edge node closer to them…
Microsoft ExpressRoute, as much as it can be complicated and hard work to implement, I have done the hard work and turned the complication into something that is understandable. To begin with, I’ll point out a couple of significant changes to ExpressRoute this year: Bye bye Public peering. Beginning April 1, 2018, public peering is…
Monitoring & Logging on-prem Linux devices/servers takes into consideration that the majority of network devices and network appliances are all Linux based and there are also a large number of Linux servers in circulation. A large number of my customers use a large number of Linux servers and network devices – which all need to…
Here’s an example similar to my other Blog post Instant Monitoring of Windows Services. Instead, this blog demonstrates monitoring Performance Counters and using alerts to fire off a scheduled task. This scheduled task fires off a PowerShell script which in turn fires off an Azure Function, which in turn fires off an SMS text message…
Has there been a seriously critical Windows Service which you need to monitor in real-time, or more than one Windows Service? – i.e. as soon as the Windows Service stops, you need to be notified by getting an SMS text message to your phone – within 5 seconds? While this is slightly manual, once setup,…
You can send practically any data to Azure Log Analytics (aka. OMS). As long as you can convert it to JSON format prior to sending it to your Log Analytics workspace. Here’s the official write up on it https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/log-analytics/log-analytics-data-collector-api. Data that you upload gets sent to a custom log, with the characters ‘_CL‘ at the end,…
