Azure Management Tools

Question 1

Tools and utilities provided by Microsoft for the resource management

Answer 1

• Azure CLI and PowerShell: allows you to write scripts
• Azure Portal: web site where you have to log in, is secure, you have permissions
• Azure Cloud Shell: allow you to write your scripts in the browser without the need of installing Azure CLI or PowerShell (Go to the portal, on the top bar, at the right of the search bar click the icon and like that you can open Cloud Shell that is basically a command bar)
• Azure Mobile App: App that allows you to check the health and status of the resources; run commands; start, stop and restart servers

Question 2

Azure Advisor

Answer 2

It runs and analyzes your usage of Azure and makes suggestions to you on how to improve availability, security, performance, operational excellence and cost. It’s a way for you to save money and use their services to the maximum capabilities you can. It’s like a dashboard with graphs, percentages and visual cues. It’s a free service.

Question 3

ARM Templates

Answer 3

It’s a deployment service for managing Azure resources under the hood.
It’s written under JSON JavaScript object notation style.
It’s a way for documenting and controlling your infrastructure and how it changes in a very documented way.

Question 4

Azure Monitor

Answer 4

It’s a centralized dashboard for most of your resources in Azure (check what’s working, what’s broken, the error messages, alerts).
Everything that comes in gets stored in metrics and logs tables and then you have multiple ways of visualizing those errors (run queries, create dashboards, notifications, alerts)
It’s free but you pay for the storage.

Question 5

Azure Service Health

Answer 5

A way to know if Azure itself is having problems like misconfiguration of a router, some deployment went bad. You can check the issues, when they happened and what/how they happened.

It checks for issues that affected all of Azure for a particular region or service, not your instance. Global for everyone not in your account or subscription but you can check for regions where you have resource deployed and you can pin it to show only what you want when you want.

You can also add alerts, like email, when your resources are affected or a incident even if doesn’t affects you happened.