Azure

Towards the end of 2024 Microsoft announced new configuration opportunity for Azure Private DNS zones called fallback to Internet. I think that it was announced more or less right after the 2024 Microsoft Ignite event. This functionality is, at the point of writing this blog post still in preview so proceed with caution 😼 I’ve started working with it shortly after it was released, and I would like to share some thoughts and use cases here where utilizing this functionality can make sense, as well as demonstrate how you can implement it yourself. ...

Following the retirement of classic Application Insights in February 2024 I think that it’s a great opportunity to share a quick tip on how you can easily automate migration of all of your classic instances to workspace-based Application Insights. There’s a pretty detailed article available as part of Microsoft documentation that walks you through the advantages of workspace-based Application Insights, differences with the classic type and how the table structure differs between those two types. I will not cover it in much detail in this blog post, but I would encourage you to check out the article for more information on the topic: Migrate to workspace-based Application Insights resources. ...

This blog post is a contribution to Azure Back to School - an annual community event taking place in September. For the Community by the Community, during the whole month of September, contributors share their knowledge and experience about Azure. You’re welcome to check out all the contributions here: 2023 Azure Back to School Session Schedule Introduction Chaos engineering has been known to the tech industry for quite many years now, but it has gained significant popularity and wider adoption during the last few years. There are good reasons for why this acceleration has happened. If we take a look at a modern software development landscape we will see that we’re steadily building more complex, distributed systems and applications, with hundreds or even thousands of dependencies and interconnections. Ensuring that all of these bits and pieces play nicely together to provide availability, stability and security of our systems at all times is a challenge that’s not for the faint-hearted. ...

I’ve been in quite a pickle recently: I needed to find out how many and what Azure Policy definitions from Guest Configuration category are currently assigned to my subscription, so that I could understand if any of those policies are applicable to Azure Arc-enabled servers that are residing in the same subscription. Why? Well, because Guest Configuration is a billed functionality, when it comes to Azure Arc. In this case it’s good to get an overview if any policies related to the billed functionality are enabled in order to further evaluate if you want to use this functionality or not (and therefore disable it to avoid undesired billing). You may also have different use cases for why you would want to retrieve the same information from Azure Policy🧐 ...

If you’re using Application Insights SDK in your .NET applications and you want to gather performance counters like disk, memory or CPU usage, you have two main approaches that you can follow: EventCounters: this is a future-proof, cross-platform alternative to classic performance counters that natively supports collection of system and custom counters both from .NET Framework and .NET (Core) applications. I will share more about EventCounters and how you can use these in a subsequent blog post, therefore EventCounters are out of scope for this blog post. ...