As more and more organisations dive into Azure, storage consumption continues to grow and so does the cost to businesses. Azure offers almost a limitless supply of storage, but this comes at a cost so it’s important to know exactly where that storage is going. There are a few ways to get this information, either via the Azure portal, Azure Storage Explorer or even PowerShell. However, all these tools have limitations and to be honest, rather lacking and not that straightforward.

To get some serious work done, we usually need to prepare for it. “Baby steps first,” they say. In our niche, these “baby steps” would be countless small jobs that need to be done before we can start with our main project. Proper preparation(try saying this 5 times fast) is the key to success, but after we’ve achieved our primary goal, there will always be something to do to keep it steady and flowing.

Azure Network Security Groups (NSG) are used to filter network traffic to and from resources in an Azure Virtual Network. If you’re coming from AWS-land, NSG’s combine Security Groups and NACL’s. Splunking NSG flow log data will give you access to detailed telemetry and analytics around network activity to & from your NSG's. If that doesn’t sound appealing to you yet, here are some of the many things you could Splunk with your network traffic logs from Azure.

Cloud Docs feature in Serverless360 helps you to document your Microsoft Azure Subscription. It comes with the capability to aggregate data from disparate Resource Providers in Microsoft Azure in a single report. This allows for the creation of composite technical documentation across resources enabling richer insights that would otherwise be impossible. Interpreting your cost and resource information on Microsoft Azure subscription into legible documentation is what Cloud Docs are for.

There are so many great things that can be said about Loki – I recently wrote about them here. But today, I want to talk about something technical that has been difficult for Loki users, and how we might make it easier: using Loki for short-lived services. Historically, one of Loki’s blind spots is ingesting logs from infrastructure you don’t control, because you can’t co-locate a forwarding agent like promtail with your application logs.

With the accelerated pace of digital transformation, DevOps, adoption of new platforms, and also managing cloud resources are becoming increasingly challenging for central IT. Applying available best practices, compliance requirements and cost management are adding to the challenge. With the Serverless technologies, customers can apply such policies to cloud resources and run them over a long time.

AppDynamics has received a new AWS Service Ready Program designation for Outposts. Learn what that means for your business.

The Federal Cloud Computing Strategy (FCCS) makes it clear government agencies have significant responsibilities for protecting cloud-hosted data. The FCCS states the need for agencies to develop their own governance models and create service level agreements to ensure they’ll have continuous access to log data and prompt notification from their cloud service provider if there’s a breach.