My first blog article isn’t going to be about a new feature but more something that I wanted to write about because I believe many customers who are using Azure are not aware of it.
Many people think of Azure as its own self-contained world, and that it’s either running on Azure or it’s not. Microsoft themselves will happily promote hybrid cloud these days and by all means advocate keeping some services running on-premises and making use of Azure where it fits. More and more businesses are adopting this model and migrating some systems to Azure while keeping usually older legacy systems on-premises that aren’t yet ready for a move to the cloud. This is a good step forward but it’s not quite as black and white as this. You may already be using Azure to backup or replicate your on-premises systems to the cloud but you don’t have to stop there.
Many other Azure services such as Azure Monitor and Security Center can actually be integrated with on-premises systems also. If you have a hybrid cloud model in place you will hopefully be making use of Azure monitor already to monitor your Azure hosted services but what about the on-premises systems? Are you using a third party agent to monitor these? Wouldn’t it be nice to use Azure monitor for these systems also and have everything logged in one place? Wouldn’t it be nice to use the same alerting mechanism for both your on-premises and Azure services?
This is achieved through installing a monitoring agent on your on-premises devices and collecting the log data to a log analytics workspace in Azure. You can then use Azure monitor and Azure security center to monitor your on-premises resources and alert on them just as if they were Azure resources.
This process is very nicely documented here and very quick to set up.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/learn/quick-collect-windows-computer
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