Week of June 18, 2024: Azure Updates
Generally Available: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics dedicated clusters now supported in Azure portal
Status: Now Available
You can now create and manage dedicated clusters in Azure portal including cluster create, delete, link and unlink workspaces, change commitment tier and view clusters’ configuration.
Up until now, clusters could be provisioned and managed programmatically using CLI, PowerShell, and REST – We’ve received your asks to support it in Azure portal for simpler configuration and view, and easily answer questions like: how many workspaces are linked, or what is the commitment tier?
Additional experiences such as Customer-managed key configuration are planned next.
Dedicated cluster Overview
Reference
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Public Preview: Summary rules in Azure Monitor Log Analytics, for optimal consumption experiences and cost
Status: In Preview
Summary rules allows you to aggregate ingested data to a workspace for each given query and cadence, and ingest the result back to a custom log table in workspace for optimal consumption experiences and cost.
Summary rules operates as batch processing directly in your Log Analytics workspace. It aims to summarize incoming data to your workspace in small chunks, defined by bin size, and ingest the results to Analytics custom log table in your workspace. While running complex queries on large data sets may time-out, and is limited on Basic tier, it’s much easier to analyze and report on summarized data that has been “cleaned” and aggregated to a reduced set of data that you need.
Example scenarios:
Perform analysis and reports on large data sets and time ranges for security and incident analysis, month-over-month and annual business reports.
Optimize cost ingesting low fidelity or verbose logs to tables in lower tier (e.g. Basic), and summarize to Analytics table that can be used for reports, dashboards, or analysis, and retained for long time in lower cost.
Segregate table level access for privacy and security, by obfuscation of privacy details in summarized data that can be shared.
Summary rules diagram
Rule configuration
Initial configuration is provided via REST in public clouds, and follow with Bicep and Terraform. CLI, PowerShell, and Azure portal are planned in the future around general availability.
Reference
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Generally Available: Run Azure Load Testing on Azure Functions
Status: Now Available
You can now create and run load tests directly from Azure Functions in Azure portal. Load test your functions by simply selecting the function, key and specifying request parameters and load configuration. You will automatically gain access to client-side and Functions metrics, which will help in identifying performance bottlenecks. You can also view the test run history to continuously monitor your Function App performance. Learn more.
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Generally Available: Run load tests in debug mode on Azure Load Testing
Status: Now Available
Azure Load Testing now supports running low scale test runs in Debug mode enabling better debuggability with enhanced logging. It provides debug logs for the test script, and request and response data for every failed request during the test run. Debuggability of test scripts during load testing is crucial for identifying and resolving issues early in the testing process. It allows you to validate the test configuration, understand the application behavior under load, and troubleshoot any issues that arise. Learn more.
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Public Preview: Azure SQL updates for mid-June 2024
Status: In Preview
In mid-June 2024, the following updates and enhancements were made to Azure SQL:
Work with Unicode and text data efficiently using UNISTR and || operators in Azure SQL Database.
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Public Preview: Azure Cosmos DB continuous backup for accounts using Azure Synapse Link
Status: Now Available
Continuous backup is now in public preview for Azure Cosmos DB accounts using Azure Synapse Link. Migrate to continuous backup to optimize costs and unlock point-in-time restores. This also enables you to use Fabric mirroring, for your advanced analytics on Microsoft Fabric. Continuous backup is a pre-requisite for Fabric mirroring. Learn more.
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General Availability: vCore-based Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB now supports Mongo Ver 7.0
Status: Now Available
We are thrilled to announce that vCore-based Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB has expanded its capabilities and now supports MongoDB Version 7.0. This is a significant step forward in our commitment to providing the best possible service. Learn more.
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End of Support: Azure support plan offer being discontinued on June 30, 2024
Status: End of Support
The existing Azure Support offer is being discontinued on June 30, 2024. Beginning July 1, 2024, all customers who do not already have a paid support plan (Microsoft Unified, ProDirect support, etc.) will need to purchase a support plan if they wish to maintain technical support coverage.
Customers will retain access to the subscription management and billing support services available to all Azure customers at no charge.
Customers wishing to transact support on their Enterprise Agreement should contact their Microsoft representative or partner.
Customers wishing to transact support on their Microsoft Customer Agreement, can purchase support online in the Azure Portal.
The webpage will be updated on July 1, 2024 to note that the promotional offer has come to an end.
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Public Preview: Announcing Foundation Model Training
Status: In Preview
With Foundation Model Training, Azure Databricks users can use their own data to customize a foundation model to optimize performance for their specific application.
By fine-tuning or continuing training of a foundation model, organizations can train their own model using significantly less data, time, and compute resources versus training a model from scratch.
Azure Databricks users have everything in a single platform: their own data to use for training, the foundation model to train, checkpoints saved to MLflow, and the model registered in Unity Catalog ready to deploy.
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Generally Available: Azure Virtual Network Manager mesh and direct connectivity
Status: Now Available
Azure Virtual Network Manager mesh connectivity configuration, direct connectivity in the hub and spoke connectivity configuration are generally available in all public regions. Visit the connectivity configuration documentation to learn more about Azure Virtual Network Manager’s connectivity configuration.
This feature allows a group of virtual networks to directly communicate with each other without an additional hop, thus improving the latency and management overhead of connectivity of each virtual network. For example, you can use this feature to let a subset of the spoke virtual networks, that require low latency in hub and spoke topology to directly communicate to each other. The traffic between these virtual networks can be filtered using network security groups and Azure Virtual Network Manager’s security admin rules while maintaining direct connectivity. To learn more about security admin rules and their use cases, please see the documentations on security admin rule concepts.
Additionally, the traffic can be monitored using VNet flow logs. For further information on VNet flow logs, refer to the virtual network flow logs documentation.
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Generally Available: Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry-based Distro adds Live Metrics
Status: Now Available
Azure Monitor application insights is a cloud native application monitoring offer which enables customers to observe failures, bottlenecks, and usage patterns to resolve incidents faster and reduce downtime.
Live Metrics is a production-grade capability within Azure Monitor application insights that enables you to see telemetry flowing off your application with one-second latency. For example, you may use Live Metrics as you deploy updates to production to see real-time key metrics (e.g. failure rate change).
The Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry “Distro” includes a thin wrapper that enables you to get started with a single line of code, and it includes added Azure-specific capabilities such as Live Metrics to give you a first-class experience on Azure.
Today’s announcement adds Live Metrics to .NET, Node.js, and Python. The Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Java Distro already had Live Metrics. Our immediate next step is to add filtering to Live Metrics, so that you can customize your near-real time view.
Learn More:
https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/azure-monitor/app/opentelemetry-enable
https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/azure-monitor/app/live-stream
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Generally Available: Azure Monitor Log Enablement Policy Expansion
Status: Now Available
Azure Monitor enables customers to gain end-to-end observability into their applications, infrastructure, and network by collecting, analyzing and acting on telemetry data from their cloud and hybrid environments. Diagnostic settings is a common mechanism by which customers can enable collection of platform logs that Azure makes available on the performance of their Azure resources.
The Azure Monitor team has recently released into general availability (GA) new built-in policies and initiatives for enabling diagnostic settings at scale for all log categories, and updated initiatives for auditing customer interactions with service settings and service data via Azure Policy. https://aka.ms/azmonauditpolicy
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