Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

How to see all your Azure VM Snapshots

Snapshots in Azure is a nice feature that allows you to take a read-only, “point in time” snapshot of a Virtual Machine’s disk. You can take a snapshot of a VM’s OS or data disk. You can use this snapshot to revert the VM to a point in time before an event occurred, or you installed something that didn’t go quite right.

How to get the size of all your Azure Storage Accounts

Do you really ever know how much Azure Storage you are consuming or how many Azure Storage Blobs you have in each of your Storage Accounts? Perhaps you just need an overview of your Azure Storage Account Consumption, including things like the number of Blobs per storage account, Number of Containers, and the Azure Blob Storage Capacity used. All this information is quite easy to gather from one of the several reports available in Cloud Storage Manager.

How to Minimise your Azure Blob Storage Costs

We all know that while Microsoft provides an almost seemingly infinite amount of storage. Compare this to your normal datacentre virtual infrastructure, you often need to do some capacity planning for expected Virtual Machine Compute and Storage way ahead of time. As Microsoft does the capacity planning for you (and everyone else who is using their services), your own Operational Support no longer needs to order disks or more servers to keep up with your business growth and expectations.

How to download an Azure VM

If you require a way to download your Azure Virtual Machine to either your on premise VMware or Hyper-V environment, perhaps because the cost of running that Azure VM is too high, or even for some compliance reason this blog will show you how to quickly download your Azure VM easily with Carbon. No need to download your Azure VM via powershell, or even downloading the VHD from the Azure portal. Carbon will download and convert your Azure VM to your hypervisor of choice with just a few clicks.

How to find Azure BLOB files that haven't been accessed

Azure storage has provided companies with a way to store almost limitless amount of data. But just like kids in a candy store this can get out of hand, and expensive. Being able to store as much data as you want is great, however it is something that can grow to a point where you are spending more on storage than you actually need.

Move users to another domain and retain AD Connect sync

We were recently asked for help by one of our clients that needed to separate a number of users from their existing domain by moving them into their own Active Directory forest. This can happen for all sorts of reasons, including divestments, security, geographical or division separation. Whatever the reason, they needed to move these users across into an entirely new AD domain.

How to sync users from a second domain using AD Connect

Do you need to integrate a new company in with your existing employer and therefore in to your already provisioned Azure AD tenant. Or perhaps just need to share your tenancy and office 365 services with more than one company, then you could find yourself in a position where you need to sync users from another domain and have already configured AD Connect, well there is a way to add the second domain to your current Azure tenancy, so you can sync those users from the second domain.

How to Get Azure Blob Container Size

Something we get asked quite often is, how can I see the size of my Containers in each Storage Account? We know that Azure storage is one of the fastest growing aspects of Azure because it offers almost a limitless supply of storage, so companies are consuming more and more storage at an explosive rate. The question of being able to track this consumption is becoming more and more relevant. OK, so how can I get the size of my containers in a Storage Account?