Azure

So, what’s up?

December 19, 2019December 20, 2019
Azure, European SharePoint Conference, Microsoft Ignite, Thoughts

Don’t worry. This is not one of those end-of-the-year/end-of-a-decade posts. I’ll do that next week. I’ve taken the habit to reflect, reminisce and gather up my thoughts a few times a year. I did that a few months ago in October, and before that in June. As I’ve perhaps mentioned, I’ve been on an extended leave of absence since April. I spent the summer finishing up some projects, focusing on my well-being and spending time… Read More »

Building a monitoring solution for Office 365 service availability using Azure Logic Apps

December 17, 2019December 17, 2019
Azure, Office 365

I spent some time in early December building an integration between Azure Log Analytics (and Azure Sentinel, obviously) and Office 365 Audit Logs. The latter exposes the logs through Office 365 Management Activity API, which is very handy, albeit slightly cumbersome to use. I wrote about that experience here. I noticed that there is also a separate Office 365 API I found useful, called the Office 365 Service Communications API. It’s much simpler to use,… Read More »

Building a monitoring solution for Power Platform events using PowerShell, C#, Azure Log Analytics, and Azure Sentinel

December 9, 2019December 9, 2019
.NET Core, Azure, PowerShell, Security

I’m writing this from the beautiful and sunny city of Prague, where I’m attending the European SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure Conference. It’s a 4-day event, with hundreds of sessions, and some very insightful keynotes also. I’m delivering two sessions here, and one of those was on monitoring and managing Power Apps and Power Automate. As you probably know, Power Automate used to be called Microsoft Flow. They are both parts of the Power Platform,… Read More »

Adding a free SSL certificate to an Azure Web App

November 24, 2019November 24, 2019
Azure, Security

One of the many announcements Microsoft made during Ignite 2019 was the capability to add free SSL certificates to Web Apps on Azure. You can read the announcement here. “Wow, that’s beyond great!”, I remember thinking on my way to Orlando for Ignite at the time. I can finally secure all my web apps without paying hundreds of dollars to third-parties for SSL certificates. So, I went on to try this new capability. Let’s see… Read More »

Generating random numbers from a lava lamp using .NET Core

November 19, 2019November 19, 2019
.NET Core, Azure, Gadgets

I used to have a lava lamp when I was young. I mean, I’m still relatively young, but I haven’t had a lava lamp in decades anymore. I think it was a fad of the 1990s, and when everyone realized the lamps actually broke rather easily, the hype died quickly. Our family also had a bread machine around the same time. We don’t have that either, anymore. When I read about Cloudflare’s random number generator… Read More »

Building a simple backup solution for Hyper-V-based virtual machines using OneDrive for Business and PowerShell

October 14, 2019October 14, 2019
Azure, OneDrive for Business, PowerShell, Synology

At home, I run several PCs – a few laptops, and one workstation which is a bit more performant, so that I can run Hyper-V and virtual machines on it. It’s also my server for Plex, the amazing multimedia system that effectively allows me to have my own private Netflix wherever I go. At the moment, my server runs on Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, which is the special edition for high-performance PCs. Among others,… Read More »

Building a secure remote access solution using Azure Bastion Host

September 26, 2019September 26, 2019
Azure, Security

I wrote about my experiences and challenges when building a secure remote access solution for Azure-based virtual machines back in February 2019. It’s one of my more popular posts in this blog, and I guess it’s helpful for many because it travels through the options and provides justification for the choices. As that’s often one of the challenges when working with Azure and architectures – there is plenty of choices, and it might be burdensome… Read More »

Understanding and getting started with Azure Sentinel

September 24, 2019September 25, 2019
Azure, Security

Today, Microsoft announced that Azure Sentinel is now Generally Available (GA). What this means, is that Azure Sentinel can be used in production, the pricing has been revealed and it’s stable for enterprise-grade usage. In this post, I’ll have a look at what Azure Sentinel is, how to get started and what to keep an eye for in the future. What is Azure Sentinel? Azure Sentinel is Microsoft’s vision of a cloud-based SIEM – which… Read More »

Building a custom Twitter Analytics tool using .NET Core, Azure Storage, and Power BI

August 23, 2019August 23, 2019
.NET Core, Azure, Power BI

This week has been very productive for me. I’ve been running and thinking, and in the mornings I’ve written about my thoughts. Today is no different! I’ve been a Twitter user for 10 years now – I joined in May 2009. At first, I was a passive user, but in recent years I’ve given it more effort and I’ve found Twitter quite useful and valuable for myself. One thing that’s kept me awake all these… Read More »

A look at Azure costs based on a real solution

August 20, 2019August 20, 2019
Azure, Finance

I’ve used and worked with Microsoft Azure for a decade now. Often I’m working in customer subscriptions, and don’t have to worry about the cost that much. Obviously many times customers are querying about long-term cost, and what operating expenses they should plan and budget for. My own Azure subscriptions are financed by myself, and I get some credits through the Microsoft MVP program also. I try to minimize services that cost more, and often… Read More »