Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Announcing Azure Monitor AIOps Alerts with Dynamic Thresholds

We are happy to announce that Metric Alerts with Dynamic Thresholds is now available in public preview. Dynamic Thresholds are a significant enhancement to Azure Monitor Metric Alerts. With Dynamic Thresholds you no longer need to manually identify and set thresholds for alerts. The alert rule leverages advanced machine learning (ML) capabilities to learn metrics’ historical behavior, while identifying patterns and anomalies that indicate possible service issues.

Metric Alerts with Dynamic Thresholds are supported through a simple Azure portal experience, as well as provides support for Azure workloads operations at scale by allowing users to configure alert rules through an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) API in a fully automated manner.

Why and when should I apply Dynamic Thresholds to my metrics alerts?

Smart metric pattern recognition – A big pain point with setting static threshold is that you need to identify patterns on your own and create an alert rule for each pattern. With Dynamic Thresholds, we use a unique ML technology to identify the patterns and come up with a single alert rule that has the right thresholds and accounts for seasonality patterns such as hourly, daily, or weekly. Let’s take the example of HTTP requests rate. As you can see below, there is definite seasonality here. Instead of setting two or more different alert rules for weekdays and weekends, you can now get Azure Monitor to analyze your data and come up with a single alert rule with Dynamic Thresholds that changes between weekdays and weekends.

Scalable alerting – Wouldn’t it be great if you could automatically apply an alert rule on CPU usage to any virtual machine (VM) or application that you create? With Dynamic Thresholds, you can create a single alert rule that can then be applicable automatically to any resource that you create. You don’t need to provide thresholds. The alert rule will identify the baseline for the resource and define the thresholds automatically for you. With Dynamic Thresholds, you now have a scalable approach that will save a significant amount of time on management and creation of alerts rules.

Domain knowledge – Setting a threshold often requires a lot of domain knowledge. Dynamic Thresholds eliminates that need with the use of your ML algorithms. Further, we have optimized the algorithms for common use cases such as CPU usage for a VM or requests duration for an application. So you can have full confidence that the alert will capture any anomalies while still reducing the noise for you.

Intuitive configuration – Dynamic Thresholds allow setting up metric alerts rules using high-level concepts, alleviating the need to have extensive domain knowledge about the metric. This is expressed by only requiring users to select the sensitivity for deviations (low, medium, high) and boundaries (lower, higher, or both thresholds) based on the business impact of the alert in the UI or ARM API.

Dynamic Thresholds also allow you to configure a minimum amount of deviations required within a certain time window for the system to raise an alert, the default time window is four deviations in 20 minutes. The user can configure this and choose what he/she would like to be alerted on by changing the failing periods and time window.

Metric Alerts with Dynamic Threshold is currently available for free during the public preview. To see the pricing that will be effective at general availability, visit our pricing page. To get started, please refer to the documentation, “Metric Alerts with Dynamic Thresholds in Azure Monitor (Public Preview).” We would love to hear your feedback! If you have any questions or suggestions, please reach out to us at azurealertsfeedback@microsoft.com.

Please note, Dynamic Threshold based alerts are available for all Azure Monitor based metric sources listed in the documentation, “Supported resources for metric alerts in Azure Monitor.”
Quelle: Azure

Improving the TypeScript support in Azure Functions

TypeScript is becoming increasingly popular in the JavaScript community. Since Azure Functions runs Node.js, and TypeScript compiles to JavaScript, motivated users already could get TypeScript code up and running in Azure Functions. However, the experience wasn’t seamless, and things like our default folder structure made getting started a bit tricky. Today we’re pleased to announce a set of tooling improvements that improve this situation. Azure Functions users can now easily develop with TypeScript when building their event-driven applications!

For those unfamiliar, TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript which provides optional static typing, classes, and interfaces. These features allow you to catch bugs earlier in the development process, leading to more robust software engineering. TypeScript also indirectly enables you to leverage modern JavaScript syntax, since TypeScript is compatible with ECMAScript 2015.

With this set of changes to the Azure Functions Core Tools and the Azure Functions Extension for Visual Studio Code, Azure Functions now supports TypeScript out of the box! Included with these changes are a set of templates for TypeScript, type definitions, and npm scripts. Read on to learn more details about the new experience.

Templates for TypeScript

In the latest version of the Azure Functions Core Tools and the Azure Functions Extension for VS Code, you’re given the option to use TypeScript when creating functions. To be more precise, on creation of a new function app, you will now see the option to specify TypeScript on language stack selection. This action will opt you into default package.json and .tsconfig files, setting up their app to be TypeScript compatible. After this, when creating a function, you will be able to select from a number of TypeScript specific function templates. Each template represents one possible trigger, and there is an equivalent present in TypeScript for each template supported in JavaScript.

The best part of this new flow is that to transpile and run TypeScript functions, you don’t have to take any actions at all that are unique to Functions. For example, what this means is that when a user hits F5 to start debugging Visual Studio Code, Code will automatically run the required installation tasks, transpile the TypeScript code, and start the Azure Functions host. This local development experience is best in class, and is exactly how a user would start debugging any other app in VS Code.

Learn more about how to get your TypeScript functions up and running in our documentation.

Type definitions for Azure Functions

The @azure/functions package on npm contains type definitions for Azure Functions. Have you ever wondered what’s an Azure Function object is shaped like? Or maybe, the context object that is passed into every JavaScript function? This package helps! To get the most of TypeScript, this should to be imported in every .ts function. JavaScript purists can benefit too – including this package in your code gives you a richer Intellisense experience. Check out the @azure/functions package on npm to learn more!

Npm scripts

Included by default in the TypeScript function apps is a package.json file including a few simple npm scripts. These scripts allow Azure Functions to fit directly into your typical development flow by calling specific Azure Functions Core Tools commands. For instance, ‘npm start’ will automatically run ‘func start’, meaning that after creating a function app you don’t have to treat it differently than any other Node.js project.

To see these in action, check out our example repo!

Try it yourself!

With either the Azure Functions Core Tools or the Azure Functions Extension for VS Code, you can try out the improved experience for TypeScript in Azure Functions on your local machine, even if you don’t have an Azure account.

Next steps

Get started with Azure Functions in VS Code.
Get started with Azure Functions in your CLI with the Azure Functions Core Tools.
Check out a sample TypeScript Function App.
Take a look at the Azure Functions JavaScript Developer Guide for additional details.
Sign up for an Azure free account if you don’t have one, and deploy your serverless apps to the cloud.

As always, feel free to reach out to the team with any feedback on our GitHub or Twitter. Happy coding!
Quelle: Azure

Announcing the general availability of Java support in Azure Functions

Azure Functions provides a productive programming model based on triggers and bindings for accelerated development and serverless hosting of event-driven applications. It enables developers to build apps using the programming languages and tools of their choice, with an end-to-end developer experience that spans from building and debugging locally, to deploying and monitoring in the cloud. Today, we’re pleased to announce the general availability of Java support in Azure Functions 2.0!

Ever since we first released the preview of Java in Functions, an increasing number of users and organizations have leveraged the capability to build and host their serverless applications in Azure. With the help of input from a great community of preview users, we’ve steadily improved the feature by adding support for easier authoring experiences and a more robust hosting platform.

What’s in the release?

With this release, Functions is now ready to support Java workloads in production, backed by our 99.95 percent SLA for both the Consumption Plan and the App Service Plan. You can build your functions based on Java SE 8 LTS and the Functions 2.0 runtime, while being able to use the platform (Windows, Mac, or Linux) and tools of your choice. This enables a wide range of options for you to build and run your Java apps in the 50+ regions offered by Azure around the world.

Powerful programming model

Using the unique programming model of Functions, you can easily connect them to cloud scale data sources such as Azure Storage and Cosmos DB, and messaging services such as Service Bus, Event Hubs, and Event Grid. Triggers and bindings enable you to invoke your function based on an HTTP request, or schedule an event in one of the aforementioned source systems. You can also retrieve information or write back to these sources as part of the function logic, without having to worry about the underlying Java SDK.

Easier development and monitoring

Using the Azure Functions Maven plugin you can create, build, and deploy your Functions from any Maven-enabled project. The open source Functions 2.0 runtime will enable you to run and debug your functions locally on any platform. For a complete DevOps experience, you can leverage the integration with Azure Pipelines or setup a Jenkins Pipeline to build your Java project and deploy it to Azure.

What is even more exciting is that popular IDEs and editors such as Eclipse, IntelliJ, and Visual Studio Code can be used to develop and debug your Java Functions.

One of the added benefits of building your serverless applications with Functions is that you automatically get access to rich monitoring experiences thanks to the Azure Application Insights integration for telemetry, querying, and distributed tracing.

Enterprise-grade serverless

Azure Functions also makes it easy to build apps that meet your enterprise requirements. Leverage features like App Service Authentication / Authorization to restrict access to your app, and protect secrets using managed identities and Azure Key Vault. Azure boasts a wide range of compliance certifications, making it a fantastic host for your serverless Java functions.

Next steps

To get started, take a closer look at how the experience of building event-driven Java apps with Azure Functions looks like following the links below:

Build your first serverless Java Function using the instructions our tutorial.
Find the complete Azure Functions Java developer reference.
Follow upcoming features and design discussion on our GitHub repository.
Learn about all the great things you can do with Java on Azure.

With so much being released now and coming soon, we’d sincerely love to hear your feedback. You can reach the team on Twitter and on GitHub. We also actively monitor Stack Overflow and UserVoice, so feel free to ask questions or leave your suggestions. We look forward to hearing from you!
Quelle: Azure

Announcing Azure Spatial Anchors for collaborative, cross-platform mixed reality apps

It’s amazing to look back at everything we’ve learned from our customers since we first released HoloLens. Across manufacturing, education, retail, gaming, and many other industries, developers and businesses are using mixed reality in their daily workflows and giving us feedback on what they’d like to see next. When we look across all the mixed reality solutions that customers have been building over the last few years, two things really stand out: collaboration and spatial awareness. Customers want to easily share their mixed reality experiences and place applications in the context of the real world, and thereby increase their efficiency and achieve greater productivity.

Yesterday at MWC Barcelona, we announced Azure Spatial Anchors, a mixed reality service that enables you to build a new generation of mixed reality applications that are collaborative, cross-platform, and spatially aware. Today, we’re sharing two application patterns gaining momentum across industries, and how Azure Spatial Anchors can help you deliver them with greater ease and speed.

Collaborative mixed reality experiences

Mixed reality enables us, as humans, to do more and to collaborate with those around us in a more natural and intuitive way. Whether it’s architects and site workers reviewing the day’s plans for a new construction project, designers and managers collaborating on next year’s car model, or a team of surgeons planning a procedure before operating, mixed reality has changed the way that humans now design, review, and learn together. Across industries, one of the top asks from our customers is to make it easier to share such experiences in mixed reality.

As one example, Pearson Education enables nursing students and professors to practice diagnosing and treating ill patients in 3D in the real world before the pressure of a real case. Students and professors may be using HoloLens devices, or they may be using mobile phones and tablets. Until today, sharing mixed reality experiences across devices and across platforms required either environmental setup (such as QR codes) or complex coding to handle the different sensors and endpoints. Azure Spatial Anchors provides a common coordinate frame for shared mixed reality experiences across HoloLens, iOS, and Android devices without any environmental setup needed. With Azure Spatial Anchors, everyone can collaborate in mixed reality, whether they are in a heads-up, hands-free experience on HoloLens devices, or they are participating via mobile phones and tablets.

Connected devices and places

Sometimes, the best way to work on problems and find solutions isn’t in the traditional conference room; oftentimes, better, faster decisions can be made by seeing insights and data in the real-world context of the problem itself. For example, our customers in manufacturing want to be able to walk along the factory line and easily visualize the status of each machine in order to quickly navigate and focus on the equipment with issues. Until today, precisely mapping a large space and persisting that spatial understanding was not possible for most of our mixed reality customers. Azure Spatial Anchors is designed for this: connecting the right data to the right people in the right places, so people can work like they live—in 3D.

Internet of Things (IoT) can make your connected solutions even stronger. Most IoT projects today start from a things-centric approach, but with Azure Digital Twins, we’ve flipped that around. We’ve found that customers realize huge benefits by first modeling the physical environment and then connecting existing or new devices (“things”) to that model. With Azure Spatial Anchors and Azure Digital Twins, customers gain new spatial intelligence capabilities and new insights into how spaces and infrastructure are really used. By visualizing IoT data onsite and in-context on HoloLens or mobile devices, people can uncover and respond to operational issues before they impact workstreams.

Get started today!

Azure Spatial Anchors is in public preview today! We’re so excited for you to start building with us. Here are a few quick tips to get started:

Have an idea of what you want to build? Dive into our documentation.
Need some ideas on how to design and implement mixed reality solutions? Explore reference architectures for collaborative design review, facilities management, and contextual training.
Thinking about building a cross-platform mixed reality application? Start with our shared mixed reality experience quickstart.

We would love to see what you create, and we hope you share it with us via #Azure and #SpatialAnchors. We can’t wait to see what you build!
Quelle: Azure

Azure.Source – Volume 71

Now in preview

Preview: Distributed tracing support for IoT Hub

Announcing distributed tracing support for IoT Hub now in public preview. As with most IoT solutions, including our Azure IoT reference architecture, an IoT message travels from a device through a dozen or more services before it is stored or visualized. It can be very challenging to pinpoint when something has gone wrong in the flow. To completely understand the flow of messages through an IoT Hub, you must trace each message's path using unique identifiers. IoT Hub is a managed service, hosted in the cloud, that acts as a central message hub for bi-directional communication between your IoT application and the devices it manages. You can use Azure IoT Hub to build IoT solutions with reliable and secure communications between millions of IoT devices and a cloud-hosted solution backend. You can connect virtually any device to IoT Hub.

Now generally available

Update to Azure DevOps Projects support for Azure Kubernetes Service

Kubernetes is gaining strength as adoption across the industry continues to grow. However, many customers coming to container orchestration for the first time are also building familiarity with Docker and containers in general. To help with container adoption, we updated our Azure Kubernetes Service (a fully managed Kubernetes container orchestration service) and released Azure DevOps Projects (a simplified experience to help you launch an app on an Azure Service of your choice) to help you deploy multiple apps to a single Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster. These features are now generally available in the Azure portal.

More reliable event-driven applications in Azure with an updated Event Grid

Event-driven programming as a core building block for cloud application architecture has been on the rise. Enabling you to build more sophisticated, performant, and stable event-driven applications in Azure is important. Announcing the general availability of features previously in preview: Dead lettering, Retry policies, Storage Queues as a destination, Hybrid Connections as a destination, and Manual Validation Handshake. To take advantage of the these features, use 2019-01-01 API and SDKs. If you are using CLI or PowerShell, use versions 2.0.56 or later for CLI and 1.1.0 for PowerShell.

Class schedules on Azure Lab Services

Classroom labs in Azure Lab Services makes it easy to set up labs by handling the creation and management of virtual machines, enabling infrastructure to scale. Schedules management is one of the key features requested by classroom labs customers who also need to easily create, edit, and delete schedules. Through continuous enhancements, the latest deployment of Azure Lab Services now includes added support for class schedules.

News and updates

Modernize alerting using Azure Resource Manager storage accounts

Azure Monitor is a unified monitoring service that includes alerting and other monitoring capabilities. Classic alerts in Azure Monitor reach retirement in June, 2019. We recommend you migrate your classic alert rules defined on your storage accounts if you want to retain alerting functionality with the new alerting platform. If you have classic alert rules configured on classic storage accounts, you should upgrade your accounts to Azure Resource Manager (ARM) storage accounts before you migrate alert rules.

Technical content

Use GraphQL with Hasura and Azure Database for PostgreSQL

Azure Database for PostgreSQL provides a fully managed, enterprise-ready community PostgreSQL database as a service for easily migrating existing apps to the cloud or for developing cloud-native applications using the languages and frameworks you choose. Learn how to take advantage of the Hasura GraphQL Engine that can instantly provide a real-time GraphQL API on a PostgreSQL database.

Introduction to Linux on Azure

An introduction to running a Linux virtual machine on Azure. This workshop has been a collaboration between Researc/hers Code and Microsoft. Researc/hers Code supports women in tech and academia by running skills workshops and podcasting the talent of women in tech and research.

New Reference Architecture: Batch scoring of Spark models on Azure Databricks

Reference architectures provide a consistent approach and best practices for a given solution. Each architecture includes recommended practices, together with considerations for scalability, availability, manageability, security, and more. The full array of reference architectures is now available on the Azure Architecture Center. This reference architecture shows how to build a scalable solution for batch scoring an Apache Spark classification model.

Six tips for securing identity in the cloud

Many customers are turning to cloud services as an asset in fighting evolving cybersecurity threats. In this three-part series on Azure Government security, learn to use best practices for securing your Azure Government resources with essential steps needed to secure identities in the cloud. Also learn specific actions you can take to create more secure identity management within your agency or organization.

2018 Guidance from AzureCAT: SAP on the Microsoft Platform

Technical documentation for getting up-to-speed and staying up-to-date with features and industry trends in development is vital. This past year was a busy one for the Azure Customer Advisory Team. Stay informed with this useful reference list of all the SAP guidance that was published or refreshed in 2018.

Create a CI/CD pipeline for your Azure IoT Edge solution with Azure Pipelines

New CI/CD tools can help developers deliver value faster and more transparently, but the need for customized scripts that address different kinds of edge solutions still presents a challenge for some CI/CD pipelines. Now, with the Azure IoT Edge task in Azure Pipelines, developers have an easier way to build and push the modules in different platforms and deliver to a set of Azure IoT Edge devices continuously in the cloud.

Getting Started with Ansible on Azure

Cloud Advocate Jay Gordon discusses how to get started with Ansible on the Azure Cloud.  You'll get the easy first steps to use Ansible on the Cloud Shell and create a Linux VM!

Cross-Platform Container Builds with Azure Pipelines

Choosing distribution options aren’t just based on personal preference. There is usually a solid technical reason for wanting a CI build deployed on a particular platform. To aid in developing your CI/CD pipeline, Azure Pipelines enables virtual machines for running your own Docker images that have the exact version of the dependencies that you want as part of your CI/CD pipeline. Now you can have confidence that your deployment works correctly on whatever platform you choose.

Keep Calm, and Keep Coding with Azure Cosmos DB and Node.js

In this quick read, John Papa shows you how to get up and running – with links to docs to get started ASAP. In John's case, he wanted a list of heroes from his database ("Just give them to me without making me work so hard!") and he shares how the Azure Cosmos DB SDK delivers with a simple line of code.

John Papa’s Sketchnote of Cosmos and Node Together

Quick look at the Azure Shared Image Gallery

Shared Image Gallery is a service that helps you build structure and organization around your custom managed VM images. Using a Shared Image Gallery you can share your images to different users, service principals, or AD groups within your organization. Shared images can be replicated to multiple regions, for quicker scaling of your deployments. In this post, Thomas Maurer provides an overview and shows how to get started.

AZ-202 Microsoft Azure Developer Certification Transition Study Guide

Microsoft has published the exam guide for AZ-202 Microsoft Azure Developer Certification. This helpful study guide contains a list of resources you can use to help you study for the exam.

Azure shows

Episode 267 – What the Hack? | The Azure Podcast

Microsoft Cloud Solution Architects Gino Filicetti and Peter Laudati talk to the Azure Podcast team about an innovative approach to getting your team to learn Azure. They have developed a set of challenge-based hacks which allow for better retention of knowledge.

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Episode 267 – What the Hack? transcript

Third Party Azure IoT solution accelerators | Internet of Things Show

Several Microsoft partners have developed solutions ranging from edge video analytics, to digital signage, to remote well monitoring for oil and gas. These are published under our partner's GitHub repositories and free for anyone to use, rebrand, or even resell. Here’s how to leverage those partner built, open sourced, Solution Accelerators to expedite your IoT solution development.

Using Azure Boards with GitHub | The DevOps Lab

As your organization and projects grow, it can get challenging to stay focused on what's most important and to organize the various types of work involved to make progress. Now you can integrate Azure Boards with your code repository on GitHub to reduce the integration tax of using multiple systems by simply mentioning work items in your commits or pull requests. See how to integrate Azure Boards with your GitHub project.

An overview of Azure Integration Services | Azure Friday

Azure Integration Services brings together API Management, Logic Apps, Service Bus, and Event Grid as a reliable, scalable platform for integrating on-premises and cloud-based applications, data, and processes across your enterprise.

Blockchain based registries | Block Talk

Registries are used in every industry and in multiple scenarios. Blockchain-based registries that are shared, immutable and cryptographically secure serve an important need, but it's not often apparent how to write these sort of contracts. In this episode we review a blockchain devkit accelerator that can help generate the contracts from simple JSON based descriptions.

Application Insights integrations and service updates | On .NET

In this episode, Michael Milirud returns to give us updates on some new capabilities that are available Azure Application Insights. He shows us demos covering Azure DevOps, dependency tracing, Azure Functions integration, and much more.

Inception with Azure DevOps | Visual Studio Toolbox

In this episode, Donovan is joined by Gopinath Chigakkagari from the Azure DevOps team. Gopinath shows how they use Azure DevOps to build Azure DevOps! He also shows how to integrate Azure DevOps to multiple 3rd party tools and deploy to multiple clouds with a single pipeline.

How to use the Azure Virtual Machines Serial Console | Azure Tips and Tricks

In this edition of Azure Tips and Tricks, learn how to use the Azure Virtual Machines Serial Console to easily troubleshoot your virtual machines. The Azure Virtual Machine Serial Console feature is available for Windows and Linux VM images.

How to configure a new virtual machine with the Azure Portal | Azure Portal Series

Microsoft Azure provides many virtual machine configuration options for any workload or application. In this video of the Azure Portal "How To" series, learn about some of the configuration options that are available when setting up a virtual machine in the Azure Portal.

Scott Hunter on DevOps Capabilities in Azure – Episode 24 | The Azure DevOps Podcast

Learn the differences between .NET Core and .NET Framework and when and why you should move to .NET Core 3.0 in the future. In this episode of the Azure DevOps Podcast, Scott Hunter joins Jeffrey Palermo to discuss DevOps capabilities in Azure. Hear how .NET Standard bridges the gap between .NET Core and .NET Framework, where all the different architectures fit into the .NET ecosystem. The two also give an update and overview on WebAssembly and Blazor, as well as a preview of and their motivation for writing their upcoming book, .NET DevOps for Azure.

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Events

IoT in Action: New innovations making IoT faster and simpler

Several events are scheduled this week where you can learn more about IoT solutions: Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, IoT in Action global event and Embedded World in Nuremberg, and Solution Builder Conference in Houston. As the Internet of Things (IoT) disrupts global business across every industry, opportunities abound. Partners are building on Microsoft IoT innovations and expanding solution accelerators, while customers of every size are reaping the rewards through increased productivity and efficiency, new revenue streams, and broader market share. Learn how Microsoft and our partners are making IoT faster, easier, and more cost effective through innovations in Windows IoT, Azure IoT, and Azure Sphere.

Register Now: Free Hybrid Cloud Virtual Event

Join us on March 28, 2019, 8 AM-9:30 AM Pacific Time to be among the first to see new hybrid product announcements. Hear from your peers and technology leaders to gain valuable insights on ways to accelerate your hybrid cloud roadmap. Register now for free.

Azure webinar series – Migrate Your Web Applications to Azure for Scale and Agility

Thursday, February 28, 2019 10:00 AM–11:00 AM Pacific Time – Learn the simple steps for modernizing a wide variety of web apps to Azure. Esteemed Microsoft engineer Jay Schmelzer shares implementation stories of how customers scaled with Azure and solved performance and security considerations across their apps; including .NET, PHP, and Node.js. This series also features Q&A and a learning path for hosting your web apps on Azure.

Live stream analysis using Video Indexer

Video Indexer is an Azure service designed to extract deep insights from video and audio files offline. At the EBU Production Technology Seminar in Geneva last month, an end-to-end solution was demonstrated by Microsoft that uses Video Indexer in near real-time resolutions on live feeds. Several live feeds were ingested to Azure using Dejero technology or the webRTC protocol, and sent to Make.TV Live Video Cloud to switch inputs. The selected input was sent as a transcoded stream to Azure Media Services for multi bitrate transcoding and OTT delivery in low latency mode.  The same stream was also processed in near real time with Video Indexer. The full code and a step-by-step guide to deploy the results is available on GitHub.

Azure This Week – 22 February 2019 | A Cloud Guru – Azure This Week

This time on Azure This Week, Lars talks about machine learning in Stream Analytics to detect evil doings, new Azure Maps service, and Azure DevOps pipelines team have created an app for your Slack.

Quelle: Azure

IoT in Action: New innovations making IoT faster and simpler

As the Internet of Things (IoT) disrupts global business across every industry, opportunities abound. Partners are building on Microsoft IoT innovations and expanding solution accelerators, while customers of every size are reaping the rewards through increased productivity and efficiency, new revenue streams, and broader market share.

Read on to discover how Microsoft and our partners are making IoT faster, easier, and more cost effective through innovations in Windows IoT, Azure IoT, and Azure Sphere. For greater depth and inspiration, as well as some fantastic networking opportunities, be sure to attend the IoT in Action global event in Nuremberg on February 25, 2019.

 

New innovations in Azure IoT

Greater compatibility and flexibility

Azure IoT is evolving to make it more compatible with a growing list of technologies, offering far greater choice and flexibility. In 2018, Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure IoT Edge. And as of February, Azure IoT Edge is now able to run on virtual machines (VM) using a supported operating system. Also announced in February: Azure IoT Hub Java SDK will now support the Android Things platform.

Further integration with artificial intelligence and machine learning

Microsoft partners and customers are driving remarkable innovation through integration of Azure IoT with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Azure IoT enables customers to build AI-based experiences in a range of applications from cloud to edge. Azure AI Services incorporates machine learning to enable deeper control and customization.

Azure Stream Analytics, now available on IoT Edge, uses machine learning for anomaly detection and substantially reduces the costs and effort required for building and training machine learning models.

Examples of innovations using these technologies range from BMW Group’s upcoming in-car Intelligent Personal Assistant to products like the QuickSet Cloud platform that powers millions of connected devices in homes through customers including Comcast, Sony, LGI, Samsung and others.

The latest in Windows IoT

Long-term support

Windows IoT offers powerful edge-computing capabilities, integrates easily with Azure, and is ideally suited for those who are already familiar with Windows. One of the biggest enhancements to Windows IoT comes in the form of support: Microsoft is now offering long-term, comprehensive support—including silicon and security updates—that provides an extra level of confidence for customers.

Azure Device Agent 2.0

From an innovation standpoint, efficiency, security, simplicity, and repeatability are some key focus areas. Recently released for public preview is Azure Device Agent 2.0 which ticks these boxes, providing everything needed to connect a solution to Azure easily, including manageability and device provisioning. Plug and play (PnP) functionality will be coming soon.

WinML

Microsoft is investing heavily in cloud connectivity and helping to accelerate customers’ journeys to the cloud and the intelligent edge. For machine learning on the edge, Microsoft has released WinML. This set of APIs allows developers to use pre-trained machine learning models for intelligent edge devices, allowing AI compute tasks to be done locally. Benefits include improved performance, reduced bandwidth demands and cloud compute costs, and real-time results delivery.

Innovative IoT security solution: Azure Sphere

Recently shortlisted as a finalist for the Embedded World awards, Azure Sphere offers watertight security for connected microcontroller (MCU) devices at the intelligent edge. Azure Sphere includes three pivotal components that work together to lock down device security. The Azure Sphere MCU provides real-time application processes with Microsoft’s secure silicon architecture. The built-in Azure Sphere OS offers multiple layers of security. And the turnkey security service affords device-to-device and device-to-cloud security, detecting threats, and ensures certificate-based authentication.

Seeed Studio, a partner specializing in hardware developing, prototyping, and manufacturing, offers an Azure Sphere Development Kit that matches the design of the Microsoft reporting database (RDB). They also created a hardware ecosystem with access to over 100 Grove sensor modules to help rapid prototyping. Meanwhile, for developers who want to jumpstart IoT solution design and accelerate development, Avnet offers an Azure Sphere Starter Kit. The kit serves as a secure, fundamental building block that makes it very easy to have a secure device.

In addition to their Starter Kit, Avnet has unveiled two fully certified modules to reduce cost and speed your time-to-market with Microsoft’s Azure Sphere. AI-Link, a subsidiary of ChangHong group, released the first Azure Sphere module that is ready for mass production. AI-Link is a top IoT module developer and manufacturer and has shipped more than 90 million units in 2018.

Microsoft partners are also finding ways to innovate and secure their solutions using Azure Sphere. For instance, LEONI has found a way to make their cable systems smarter, more secure and more reliable. Azure Sphere enables LEONI to quickly connect digital solutions and customer applications, achieve improved hardware performance, and ensure increased security around data and equipment.

Then there is qiio and Feldschlösschen Breweries, a subsidiary of the Carlsberg Group, who have an Azure-enabled beer brewer that sends device utilization, health and performance data to the cloud via the end-to-end IoT solution of qiio. Azure Sphere securely connects the brewer, protecting the device from security breaches, giving Feldschlösschen peace of mind and useful insights around their operations.

Meet these innovative Microsoft partners – LEONI, Avnet, Seeed Studio, qiio, and AI-Link – at Embedded World in Nuremberg to see how they are using Azure Sphere to build transformative solutions.

Register for IoT in Action in Nuremberg on February 25

Register for the IoT in Action global event in Nuremberg on February 25 to find out how these and other Microsoft and partner IoT innovations are driving business transformation in every industry.

For those that want more hands-on learning, join us in Houston on April 16 for a Solution Builder Conference that explores the intelligent edge, IoT cognitive services, hybrid cloud, and IoT solution accelerators. This event is also a fantastic opportunity to talk to experts and build connections in Microsoft’s thriving customer and partner ecosystem.

Visit the Microsoft booth at Embedded World & Mobile World Congress

Explore how Microsoft and its partners’ innovative IoT solutions, using Azure Sphere and Windows IoT, are fueling digital transformation across verticals when you attend one of the following events:

•    Mobile World Congress, February 25-28 (Barcelona, Spain)

•    Embedded World, February 26-28 (Nuremberg, Germany)
Quelle: Azure

Preview: Distributed tracing support for IoT Hub

Most IoT solutions, including our Azure IoT reference architecture, use several different services. An IoT message, starting from the device, could flow through a dozen or more services before it is stored or visualized. If something goes wrong in this flow, it can be very challenging to pinpoint the issue. How do you know where the message is dropped? For example, you have an IoT solution that uses five different Azure services and 1,500 active devices. Each device sends ten device-to-cloud messages/second (for a total of 15,000 messages/second), but you notice that your web app sees only 10,000 messages/second. Where is the issue? How do you find the culprit?

To completely understand the flow of messages through IoT Hub, you must trace each message's path using unique identifiers. This process is called distributed tracing. Today, we're announcing distributed tracing support for IoT Hub, in public preview.

Get started with distributed tracing support for IoT Hub

With this feature, you can:

Precisely monitor the flow of each message through IoT Hub using trace context. This trace context includes correlation IDs that allow you to correlate events from one component with events from another component. It can be applied for a subset or all IoT device messages using device twin.
Automatically log the trace context to Azure Monitor diagnostic logs.
Measure and understand message flow and latency from devices to IoT Hub and routing endpoints.
Start considering how you want to implement distributed tracing for the non-Azure services in your IoT solution.

In the public preview, the feature will be available for IoT Hubs created in select regions.

To get started:

Follow our documentation, “Trace Azure IoT device-to-cloud messages with distributed tracing (preview).”
Check out the C sample code.
Give us feedback via UserVoice.

Quelle: Azure

Modernize alerting using Azure Resource Manager storage accounts

Classic alerts in Azure Monitor will reach retirement this coming June. We recommend that you migrate your classic alert rules defined on your storage accounts, especially if you want to retain alerting functionality with the new alerting platform. If you have classic alert rules configured on classic storage accounts, you will need to upgrade your accounts to Azure Resource Manager (ARM) storage accounts before you migrate alert rules.

For more information on the new Azure Monitor service and classic alert retirement read the article, “Classic alerts in Azure Monitor to retire in June 2019.”

Identify classic alert rules

You should first find all classic alert rules before you migrate. The following screenshot shows how you can identify classic alert rules in the Azure portal. Please note, you can filter by subscription so you can find all classic alert rules without checking on each resource separately.

Migrate classic storage accounts to ARM

New alerts do not support classic storage accounts, only ARM storage accounts. If you configured classic alert rules on a classic storage account you will need to migrate to an ARM storage account.

You can use "Migrate to ARM" to migrate using the storage menu on your classic storage account. The screenshot below shows an example of this. For more information on how to perform account migration see our documentation, “Platform-supported migration of laaS resources from classic to Azure Resource Manager.”

Re-create alert rules in new alerting platform

After you have migrated the storage account to ARM, you then need to re-create your alert rules. The new alerting platform supports alerting on ARM storage accounts using new storage metrics. You can read more about new storage metric definitions in our documentation, “Azure Storage metrics in Azure Monitor.” In the storage blade, the menu is named "Alert" for the new alerting platform.

Before you re-create alert rules as a new alert for your storage accounts, you may want to understand the difference between classic metrics and new metrics and how they are mapped. You can find detailed mapping in our documentation, “Azure Storage metrics migration.”

The following screenshot shows how to create an alert based on “UsedCapacity.”

Some metrics include dimension, which allows you to see and use different dimension value types. For example, the transactions metric has a dimension named “ResponseType” and the values represent different type of errors and success. You can create an alert to monitor transactions on a particular error such as “ServerBusyError” or “ClientOtherError” with “ResponseType”.

The following screenshot shows how to create an alert based on Transactions with “ClientOtherError.”

In the list of dimension values, you won't see all supported values by default. You will only see values that have been triggered by actual requests. If you want to monitor conditions that have not happened, you can add a custom dimension value during alert creation. For example, when you have not had anonymous requests to your storage account yet, you can still setup alerts in advance to monitor such activity from upcoming requests.

The following screenshot shows how to add a custom dimension value to monitor upcoming anonymous transactions.

We recommend creating the new alert rules first, verify they work as intended, then remove the classic alerts.

Azure Monitor is a unified monitoring service that includes alerting and other monitor capabilities. You can read more in the “Azure Monitor documentation.”
Quelle: Azure