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, these characters are appended automatically. This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters. Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters Show hidden characters #region…

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 you like to give them access to blob storage without compromising your real underlining storage account key. The SAS token is in a format which can be used in a URI/URL. It is not a certificate and is not stored anywhere, it’s purely created/constructed and…

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 scripts, MOF files and manage all your DSC nodes, to see drift, compliance etc. This blog post discusses my github repo, which: Deploys an Azure VM Deploys a vNet into a separate Resource Group (Cross Resource Group Deployment), a resource group used for shared resources…

If you want to troubleshoot DSC (Desired State Configuration)… You can easily run a DSC config script locally on your computer, apply the MOF manually on-demand and watch it apply in realtime as per the below. The below are the lines of PowerShell code you need for testing. First though, make sure you run the entire DSC Configuration block of code – so it’s in memory, similar to how a function behaves. In the example below, my DSC configuration file is called ‘Main‘. This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below….

Grab data/information from anywhere and store this in Log Analytics. Basically any log, any OS, any type of data can be captured on a loop and sent to a Log Analytics workspace on a constant basis, then can be used to pull out reports etc. My example below pulls the ‘Current Playing Song‘ out of radio station websites, it runs through many radio stations, at the end converts the aggravated results to JSON, then the data is sent to the Custom Log in Log Analytics using the API. You can run the script below on a regular basis, e.g. set…

Imagine you had a whole lot of data stored in Azure, you also want to save the most money in storage costs. By default, Azure Blob Storate is set to the Hot tier for all blobs, the most expensive storage costs, but the cheapest to read. To give you an idea of the cost savings, here are General Purpose v2 storage account pricing below as of time of publication in US dollars:   HOT COOL ARCHIVE Storage | First 50 terabyte (TB) / month $0.0208 per GB $0.0152 per GB $0.0025 per GB Storage | Next 450 TB / Month $0.02 per GB $0.0152 per…