Azure – Marc Kean

Extended Security Updates | Windows Server 2008/R2 or SQL Server 2008/R2

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…

Azure VM disk comparison

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…

Azure Virtual WAN

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…

Azure ExpressRoute demystified

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…

Linux Syslog in Log Analytics

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…

Instant Monitoring of Windows Performance

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…

Instant Monitoring of Windows Services

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,…

Log Analytics Data Collector API

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,…

Create Azure Blob Storage SAS tokens

An Azure blob SAS (Shared Access Signature) token is used in many places in order to access either a specific blob or a container. It’s simply a string made up of your storage account name and your storage account key. The whole point of the SAS token is that you can share it with anyone…

Azure Automation DSC Config example

There’s a couple of ways to do DSC on Azure, you can deploy a template and use the DSC extension resource to deploy DSC configuration to your VM (simple for quick simple deployments), or you can leverage Azure Automation as a DSC Pull server (subject of this blog), where you store all your DSC configuration…

Marc Kean

Category: Azure