Windows Admin Center Rocks for Managing Hybrid DataCenters #WAC #Azure #Winserv

Microsoft Windows Admin Center for Hybrid IT Management

I really like to work with Microsoft Windows Admin Center for managing my Hybrid workloads Windows Servers in Azure Cloud Services but also our On-premises Servers on Hyper-V and VMware platform. Even our physical Windows Servers can be managed from Windows Admin Center.

You can extend on-premises deployments of Windows Server to the cloud by using Azure hybrid services. These cloud services provide an array of useful functions, including the following:

• Protect virtual machines and use cloud-based backup and disaster recovery (HA/DR) with Azure Site Recovery.
• Track what’s happening across your applications, network and infrastructure with the help of advanced analytics and machine learning in Azure Monitor.
• Simplify network connectivity to Azure with Azure Network Adapter.
• Keep virtual machines up to date with Azure Update Management.

Azure hybrid services work with Windows Servers in the following configurations:

• Stand-alone physical servers and virtual machines (VMs)
• Clusters, including hyper-converged clusters certified by the Azure Stack HCI, and Windows Server Software-Defined (WSSD) programs

I’m working with Windows Admin Center since day one, and you see the hybrid management tool evolving with great new features to make your life as an Administrator more easier. For example you get notifications when there are updates in extensions.

Notification details about update Extensions

When you click on the link “Go to Extensions” you will see the Extensions installed and the Updates which you can install from there.

Here you see an Azure Security Center Extension update.

There are not only Microsoft extensions, but also third party solution extensions and you could build your own extension for your solution. Here you find all the information about Windows Admin Center Extensions

Third Party Windows Admin Center Extensions

Installing a New extension is easy to do, the Azure Cloud Shell (Preview) was the last extension I installed in my Azure MVP Lab to work with. Azure Cloud Shell is an interactive, authenticated, browser-accessible shell for managing Azure resources. It provides the flexibility of choosing the shell experience that best suits the way you work, either Bash or PowerShell. Cloud Shell enables access to a browser-based command-line experience built with Azure management tasks in mind. So how does this look in Windows Admin Center?

Install the Azure Cloud Shell (Preview) Extension

You find the Installed Azure Cloud Shell in the pulldown menu of WAC

Copy your code here https://microsoft.com/devicelogin

You will see this screen when you copy-paste the code

When you go back to Windows Admin Center you will see you are connected with Azure Cloud Shell CLI 😉

Azure Cloud Shell in Windows Admin Center

from here you can manage all your Azure Cloud Services via the Azure Cloud Shell CLI with Bash or Powershell.
Here you find more about Microsoft Azure Cloud Shell tools and Features.

you can add an Azure Network Adapter to your on-premises servers to help you securely connect the server to an Azure Virtual Network.

Read more about adding Microsoft Azure Network Adapter (Preview) in the top 10 Features of Windows Server 2019. Nice link speed of 40 Gbps 😉

For Management of your Windows Servers you need some tools and consoles. Windows Admin Center is supporting you to get the Management consoles in one place to do your administration and updates.
The next tree Features are in Windows Admin Center to manage your Windows Server.

Powershell inside WAC of my Domain Controller

Windows PowerShell is a task-based command-line shell and scripting language designed especially for system administration. Built on the .NET Framework, Windows PowerShell helps IT professionals and power users control and automate the administration of the Windows operating system and applications that run on Windows.
Here you find more information about Windows Commands

Windows Update in Windows Admin Center.

Of course you need to update your Windows Servers, and what I like in WAC is that you get the information if an update needs a reboot before you click on Install Updates. This option is good for my Azure MVP Lab but when you need to update more then 100 Servers, you would do that centrally managed like with Update Management solution in Azure

Windows Remote Desktop in WAC

Remote Desktop is one of the Features of Windows Admin Center, to take over the desktop for installations of Applications for example.

Windows Admin Center got a lot more Features and Tools to Manage your Windows Servers in a Hybrid world.
Like these :

• Storage
• Security
• System Insights
• Scheduled Tasks
• Installing Roles and Features of Windows Server
• Registry
• Processes running on your Windows Server
• Managing and deploying Clusters
• and much More………

You can install the following Resources to Manage with WAC

Windows Admin Center Overview

Conclusion:

Microsoft Windows Admin Center is the New Management tool for your Hybrid IT Management to Controle your Servers for your Business. It got all the Management consoles covered of Windows Servers to manage from one tool.
It’s easy to use and It keeps you Up-to-date of what is happening on your Windows Server but also what is New and updated. With Microsoft Windows Admin Center your are learning on the job and that’s what I Like 😉
Hope you will use Microsoft Windows Admin Center too for your Business, download it here for Free!

#Microsoft Azure Central Monitoring for your Team #Dashboards #Azure #ContainerInsights #Apps

Full Screen Monitoring

When you install Azure Virtual Machines or Kubernetes Clusters in the Microsoft Cloud, It’s important to monitor your workload and keep your IT department in Control for the Business. Metric alerts in Azure Monitor work on top of multi-dimensional metrics. These metrics could be platform metrics, custom metrics, popular logs from Azure Monitor converted to metrics and Application Insights metrics.

When you have important alerts, you want to take action based on your rules.

Take action on Alerts

Make your Own rules based on Alerts.

IT Department of a company has most of the time different teams with each having it’s own responsibility of workloads in the Microsoft Cloud. For example, the Servicedesk is supporting the Business and they like to see if all the Services are up and running for the Business. The Infrastructure Team wants the same, but on deep level components of the Services like Memory, Network, Storage, CPU, Performance, Availability and more. The Technical Application Team is interested if the application is running and working with all the Interfaces, Databases, and/or Azure Pipelines.

Each Team can build there own Azure Dashboard(s) in the Microsoft Cloud.

Here I Have made an easy example of my Windows Server 2019 Virtual Machines and my Azure Kubernetes Cluster in One Microsoft Azure Dashboard :

You can Start from Azure Monitor Metrics

Or you can Start from the Virtual Machine Blade here.

When you have your Azure Monitor metrics ready with the right information then you can create it in your Azure Dashboard for your Team.

 

Select another Dashboard.

Create your Own Dashboard.

Now we have the first VM with CPU percentage in the Azure Dashboard.

Here I have added More Virtual Machines to the Same Metric Chart.

When you have Azure Kubernetes Cluster to monitor :

From here you can Add Container Insights information into your Azure Dashboard :

Adding Azure Monitor Container Insights of KubeCluster01

The Azure Monitor Container Insights logs for your Dashboard information, with Pin to Dashboard.

 

When you right click with your mouse on the dashboard, you can edit your dashboard with more Azure Resources
from the tile Gallery. Here you can read more about creating your Own Azure Dashboard with Action Rules.

Azure Monitor for containers is a feature designed to monitor the performance of container workloads deployed to either Azure Container Instances or managed Kubernetes clusters hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Monitoring your containers is critical, especially when you’re running a production cluster, at scale, with multiple applications.
Azure Monitor for containers gives you performance visibility by collecting memory and processor metrics from controllers, nodes, and containers that are available in Kubernetes through the Metrics API. Container logs are also collected. After you enable monitoring from Kubernetes clusters, these metrics and logs are automatically collected for you through a containerized version of the Log Analytics agent for Linux and stored in your Log Analytics workspace.

 

Read here more about Azure Container Insights with Live Logs.

Follow and Join the community on LinkedIn

JOIN Azure DevOps Community 

JOIN Containers in the Cloud Community 

JOIN Azure Monitor and #Security Community 

How to monitor your #Kubernetes clusters – Best Practices Series #AKS #AzureMonitor

Get best practices on how to monitor your Kubernetes clusters from field experts in this episode of the Kubernetes Best Practices Series. In this intermediate level deep dive, you will learn about monitoring and logging in Kubernetes from Dennis Zielke, Technology Solutions Professional in the Global Black Belts Cloud Native Applications team at Microsoft.

Multi-cluster view from Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor provides a multi-cluster view showing the health status of all monitored AKS clusters deployed across resource groups in your subscriptions. It shows AKS clusters discovered that are not monitored by the solution. Immediately you can understand cluster health, and from here you can drill down to the node and controller performance page, or navigate to see performance charts for the cluster. For AKS clusters discovered and identified as unmonitored, you can enable monitoring for that cluster at any time.

Understand AKS cluster performance with Azure Monitor for containers

Container Live Logs provides a real-time view into your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) container logs (stdout/stderr) without having to run kubectl commands. When you select this option, new pane appears below the containers performance data table on the Containers view, and it shows live logging generated by the container engine to further assist in troubleshooting issues in real time.
Live logs supports three different methods to control access to the logs:

AKS without Kubernetes RBAC authorization enabled
AKS enabled with Kubernetes RBAC authorization
AKS enabled with Azure Active Directory (AD) SAML based single-sign on

You even can search in the Container Live Logs for Troubleshooting and history.

View Container Live logs with Azure Monitoring for AKS | Kubernetes | Containers 

Learn more about the Azure Monitor – Insights – Network Watcher Video #Azure #Analytics #Insights #Azuremonitor

Microsoft Azure Monitor Insights

You can subscribe here for more at Azure Academy on YouTube Channel

More information on Microsoft Azure Docs

#Microsoft Azure Monitor and Service Map Insights workbooks (Preview) #Azure #Cloud

Azure Monitor for VMs monitors your Azure virtual machines (VM) and virtual machine scale sets at scale. The service analyzes the performance and health of your Windows and Linux VMs, monitoring their processes and their dependencies on other resources and external processes.
As a solution, Azure Monitor for VMs includes support for monitoring performance and application dependencies for VMs that are hosted on-premises or in another cloud provider. Three key features deliver in-depth insight:

• Logical components of Azure VMs that run Windows and Linux: Are measured against pre-configured health criteria, and they alert you when the evaluated condition is met.
• Pre-defined, trending performance charts: Display core performance metrics from the guest VM operating system.
• Dependency map: Displays the interconnected components with the VM from various resource groups and subscriptions.

The features are organized into three perspectives:

Health
Performance
Map

Here we have a look at Azure Monitor Service map of my local machine :

Here in the Event you see two Configuration Changes.

What is awesome to see, when you double click on the link marked with a arrow, then It will start log analytics with the right query to see what those changes are 🙂

You see some Changes in Windows Services and Updates on my local Machine

Communications of the local machine on-premisses

Workbooks combine text, Analytics queries, Azure Metrics, and parameters into rich interactive reports. Workbooks are editable by any other team members who have access to the same Azure resources.

Click here on Workbooks

Workbook templates

Here you can use the default workbook templates, but you can also create your own for your Team.
Microsoft has a GitHub Repository for Applications Insights workbooks, where you can contribute

Local Machine On-premises

Communications of the on-premises Machine.

Here you can read more on Microsoft Azure Monitor to get your Virtual Machines on Board

See also :

Microsoft Azure Monitor Documentation

Microsoft Azure Monitor & Security for Hybrid IT Community Group on LinkedIn

Follow Microsoft Azure Monitor on Twitter

View Container Live logs with #Azure Monitoring #AKS #Kubernetes #Containers #AzureDevOps

Monitoring Azure Kubernetes Cluster

Azure Monitor for containers is a feature designed to monitor the performance of container workloads deployed to either Azure Container Instances or managed Kubernetes clusters hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Monitoring your containers is critical, especially when you’re running a production cluster, at scale, with multiple applications.
Azure Monitor for containers gives you performance visibility by collecting memory and processor metrics from controllers, nodes, and containers that are available in Kubernetes through the Metrics API. Container logs are also collected. After you enable monitoring from Kubernetes clusters, these metrics and logs are automatically collected for you through a containerized version of the Log Analytics agent for Linux and stored in your Log Analytics workspace.

Here you find awesome documentation about Understanding AKS cluster performance with Azure Monitor for containers

What I really like is that you now can see the Container Live logs from the Azure portal and see what is going on in the background of a Container 🙂

Activate Azure Kubernetes Container Live Logs

Here you see the Container Live logs

This feature provides a real-time view into your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) container logs (stdout/stderr) without having to run kubectl commands. When you select this option, new pane appears below the containers performance data table on the Containers view, and it shows live logging generated by the container engine to further assist in troubleshooting issues in real time.
Live logs supports three different methods to control access to the logs:

1. AKS without Kubernetes RBAC authorization enabled
2. AKS enabled with Kubernetes RBAC authorization
3. AKS enabled with Azure Active Directory (AD) SAML based single-sign on

You even can search in the Container Live Logs for Troubleshooting and history :

Search on ssh

Azure Monitor for containers uses a containerized version of the Log Analytics agent for Linux. After initial deployment, there are routine or optional tasks you may need to perform during its lifecycle.
Because of this agent you can work with Log Analytics in Azure Monitor :

Log Analytics on Containers.

Here you find more on Log Analytics query language

Conclusion :

When you have your production workload running on Azure Kubernetes Clusters, It’s important to monitor to keep you in Control of the solution in Microsoft Azure and watch for improvements like performance for the business. With Container Live logs you can see what is going on in the Containers when you have issues and that’s great for troubleshooting to get your problem solved fast. Get your workload into Azure Containers and make your Azure DevOps CI/CD Pipelines in the Cloud.

Join the LinkedIn Community Groups for :

Containers in the Cloud

Azure DevOps Community

Microsoft Azure Monitor & Security for Hybrid IT

Monitoring Microsoft Azure Cloud Services and On-premises Datacenters #Azure #MSOMS #Cloud

Microsoft Azure Monitor

There are a range of tools for monitoring your Azure environment, from the application code running on Azure to the services and infrastructure hosting your application. These tools work together to offer comprehensive cloud monitoring and include:

• Azure Monitor – the Azure service that operates as a consolidated pipeline for all monitoring data from Azure services. It gives you access to performance metrics and events that describe the operation of the Azure infrastructure and any Azure services you are using. Azure Monitor is a monitoring data pipeline for your Azure environment, and offers that data directly into Log Analytics as well as 3rd party tools where you can gain insight into that data and combine it with data from on premises or other cloud resources.
• Application Insights – the Azure service that offers application performance monitoring and user analytics. It monitors the code you’ve written and applications you’ve deployed on Azure, on-premises, or other clouds. By instrumenting your application with the Application Insights SDK you can get access to a range of data including response times of dependencies, exception traces, debugging snapshots, and execution profiles. It provides powerful tools for analyzing this application telemetry while developing and operating your application. It deeply integrates with Visual Studio to enable you to get right to the problem line(s) of code so you can fix it, and offers usage analytics to analyze customer usage of your applications for product managers as well.

Overview of Application Insights for DevOps

• Log Analytics –  is an Azure service that ingests log and metric data from Azure services (via Azure Monitor), Azure VMs, and on-premises or other cloud infrastructure and offers flexible log search and out-of-the box analytics on top of this data. It provides rich tools to analyze data across sources, allows complex queries across all logs, and can proactively alert on specified conditions. You can even collect custom data into its central repository so you can query and visualize it. You can also take advantage of Log Analytic’s built-in solutions to immediately gain insights into the security and functionality of your infrastructure.

Log Analytics Documentation

Azure Monitor enables you to consume telemetry to gain visibility into the performance and health of your workloads on Azure. The most important type of Azure telemetry data is the metrics (also called performance counters) emitted by most Azure resources. Azure Monitor provides several ways to configure and consume these metrics for monitoring and troubleshooting.

Telemetry data is important

Because telemetry data is sending every minute, you get near to real-time monitoring of your data and/or your IT Solution.

Alerts on Azure Monitor data

Azure Monitor provides several ways to interact with metrics, including charting them in the portal, accessing them through the REST API, or querying them using PowerShell or CLI. Here you find a complete list of all metrics currently available with Azure Monitor’s metric pipeline.

There are three types of alerts off of data available from Azure Monitor — metric alerts, near real-time metric alerts (preview) and Activity Log alerts.

1. Metric alerts – This alert triggers when the value of a specified metric crosses a threshold that you assign. The alert generates a notification when the alert is “Activated” (when the threshold is crossed and the alert condition is met) as well as when it is “Resolved” (when the threshold is crossed again and the condition is no longer met)
2. Near real-time metric alerts (preview) – These alerts are similar to metric alerts but differ in a few ways. Firstly, as the name suggests these alerts can trigger in near real-time (as fast as 1 min). They also support monitoring multiple(currently two) metrics. The alert generates a notification when the alert is “Activated” (when the thresholds for each metric are crossed at the same time and the alert condition is met) as well as when it is “Resolved” (when at least one metric crosses the threshold again and the condition is no longer met).
3. Activity log alerts – A streaming log alert that triggers when an Activity Log event is generated that matches filter criteria that you have assigned. These alerts have only one state, “Activated,” since the alert engine simply applies the filter criteria to any new event. These alerts can be used to become notified when a new Service Health incident occurs or when a user or application performs an operation in your subscription, for example, “Delete virtual machine.”

Alerts overview

 

When you go to the Microsoft Azure Portal and click on the left side on Monitor you can start your Solutions and configure them.

To Gain visibility and control across your hybrid cloud with simplified security and operations management there is Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS)

Here you find a lot of Hybrid Solutions to monitor and find the benefits of Cloud management with Log Analytics.

Understanding alerts in Log Analytics :

 

Alerts are created by alert rules that automatically run log searches at regular intervals. If the results of the log search match particular criteria then an alert record is created. The rule can then automatically run one or more actions to proactively notify you of the alert or invoke another process. Different types of alert rules use different logic to perform this analysis.

In addition to creating an alert record in the Log Analytics repository, alerts can take the following actions.

• Email. Send an email to proactively notify you of a detected issue.
• Runbook. An alert in Log Analytics can start a runbook in Azure Automation. This is typically done to attempt to correct the detected issue. The runbook can be started in the cloud in the case of an issue in Azure or another cloud, or it could be started on a local agent for an issue on a physical or virtual machine.
• Webhook. An alert can start a webhook and pass it data from the results of the log search. This allows integration with external services such as an alternate alerting system, or it may attempt to take corrective action for an external web site.

Here you find more on Understanding alerts in Log Analytics

To keep you in Control of monitoring, Microsoft made two Mobile Apps :

Microsoft Operations Management Suite Mobile App

Microsoft OMS on my Phone

And you got the Microsoft Azure Mobile App

For Microsoft Azure Monitoring there are all kind of Solutions in the Marketplace available :

Microsoft Azure Marketplace

Conclusion :

Monitoring your IT Solutions is really important for your Application Life Cycle management to get feedback for improvements and to get Customer satisfaction.
With Microsoft Monitoring from the Cloud with Azure and OMS you get more inside information via telemetry and log analytics to keep you Up-To-Date of
your IT Hybrid Infrastructure. Modern Hybrid Cloud Datacenter(s) need a Modern Secure Monitoring environment to keep yourself and your business in Control all the time in this rapidly fast changing IT World.
Monitoring via the Microsoft Cloud gives you :

• More Security information, Alerts and Advice to prevent security leaks
• Application improvements in your Life Cycle management
• Automation of action plans on Events.
• The Health of your IT Hybrid Cloud Services
• Makes troubleshooting much easier with Diagnostics logs
• Integration with on-premises IT Infrastructures
• OMS assessments, like Active Directory, SQL, Upgrades, Malware, Security & Audits………… and More
• Great Dashboards for DevOps, IT Administrators, IT Managers, or for your Customers.

To get More information and benefits about Monitoring and diagnostics for your Design ( Best Practices )

Hope this information is helpful to get you in control of monitoring your Hybrid Cloud Solutions.