Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Announcing the general availability of Azure Monitor for virtual machines

Today we're announcing the general availability of Azure Monitor for virtual machines (VMs), which provides an in-depth view of VM performance trends and dependencies. You can access Azure Monitor for VMs from the Azure VM resource blade to view details about a single VM, from the Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) resource blade to view details about a single VM scale set, and from Azure Monitor to understand compute issues at scale.

Azure Monitor for VMs brings together key monitoring data about your Windows and Linux VMs, allowing you to:

Troubleshoot guest-level performance issues and understand trends in VM resource utilization.
Determine whether back-end VM dependencies are connected properly and which clients of a VM may be affected by any issues the VM is having.
Discover VM hotspots at scale based on resource utilization, connection metrics, performance trends, and alerts.

Performance

Performance views are powered by Log Analytics, and offer powerful aggregation and filtering capabilities including “Top N” VM sorting and searching across subscriptions and regions, aggregation of VM metrics (such as average memory) across all VMs in a resource group across regions, percentiles of performance values over time, and breakdown and selection of VM Scale Set instances.

It can be challenging to monitor thousands of VMs. Our performance views were created to address this problem. You can use them to figure out which VMs are resource constrained, which ones are having logical disk or memory consumption issues, or to get performance diagnostics.

Maps

Azure Monitor for VMs includes dependency maps powered by the Service Map dependency agent extension. Maps deliver an Azure-centric user experience, with VM resource blade integration, Azure metadata, and dependency maps for Resource Groups and Subscriptions. Maps show how VMs and processes are interacting and can identify dependencies on third party services. Azure Monitor for VMs also monitors connection failures, live connection counts, network bytes sent and received by process, and service-level latency.

In addition to the visual experience and group-level mapping in the user experience, you can query the data sets in Log Analytics to alert on spikes in network traffic from selected workloads, query at scale for failed dependencies, and plan Azure migrations from on-premises VMs by analyzing connections over weeks or months. To assist in this analysis we offer several workbooks that provide tabular views into this rich network data set.

 

Getting started

To get started with an Azure resource, go to the resource blade for your VM or VM scale set and click on Insights in the Monitoring section. When you click Enable, you’ll be prompted to pick an existing Log Analytics workspace or create one.

Once you’re comfortable with the capabilities on a few VMs, you can view VMs at scale in Azure Monitor under Virtual Machines, and on-board to entire resource groups and subscriptions using our Get Started page, Azure Policy, or Powershell.

Check out our full documentation to get more details. Pricing is based on data ingestion and retention to your Log Analytics workspace. We’d love to hear what you like and don’t like about Azure Monitor for VMs, and where you’d like us to take it. Please click Provide Feedback in the user experience to share your thoughts.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Container Registry: Preview of customer-managed keys

The Azure Container Registry team is sharing the preview of customer-managed keys for data encryption at rest. Azure Container Registry already encrypts data at rest using service-managed keys. With the introduction of customer-managed keys you can supplement default encryption with an additional encryption layer using keys that you create and manage in Azure Key Vault. This additional encryption should help you meet your company’s regulatory or compliance needs.

Azure Container Registry encryption is supported through integration with Azure Key Vault. You can create your own encryption keys and store them in a Key Vault, or you can use Azure Key Vault API to generate encryption keys. With Azure Key Vault, you can also audit key usage.

During preview, customer-managed keys can only be enabled while creating a new registry in the Premium SKU. Enabling and disabling the feature on an existing registry will be available in an upcoming release.

With this release, you can try out the following scenarios on a customer-managed keys enabled registry:

Rotate the encryption keys using the Azure portal or the Azure command-line interface (CLI).
Geo-replicated registries and Virtual Network integration are supported.
You can enforce encryption for your registries through the built-in Azure Policy.

You can try out this feature using Azure Portal or the Azure CLI. For details, please see the documentation.

Availability and feedback

The Azure portal and CLI experience for customer-managed keys in Azure Container Registry are now in preview. As always, we love to hear your feedback on existing features as well as ideas for our product roadmap.

Roadmap: For visibility into our planned work.

UserVoice: To vote for existing requests or create a new request.

Issues: To view existing bugs and issues or log new ones.

ACR documents: For Azure Container Registry tutorials and documentation.
Quelle: Azure

Power your Azure GPU workstations with flexible GPU partitioning

Today we're sharing the general availability of NVv4 virtual machines in South Central US, East US, and West Europe regions, with additional regions planned in the coming months. With NVv4, Azure is the first public cloud to offer GPU partitioning built on industry-standard SR-IOV technology.

NVv4 VMs feature AMD’s Radeon Instinct MI25 GPU, up to 32 AMD EPYC™ 7002-series vCPUs with clock frequencies up to 3.3 GHz, 112 GB of RAM, 480 MB of L3 cache, and simultaneous multithreading (SMT).

Pay-As-You-Go pricing for Windows  deployments is available now. One- and three-year Reserved Instance and Spot Pricing for NVv4 VMs will be available on April 1. Support for Linux will be available soon.

Affordable, modern GPU powered virtual desktops in the cloud

As enterprises look to the cloud to provide virtual desktops and workstations in a secure way to a highly mobile workforce, they face the significant challenge of managing cost and performance while meeting user experience expectations. Traditionally, public clouds offered virtual machines with one or more GPUs, which are best suited for the most GPU intensive workloads that required the full power and resources of a GPU. But for the regular knowledge worker profile, a full GPU could be overkill. For some of these customers, multi-session virtual desktops like those offered by Windows Virtual Desktop fit the bill, by letting concurrent sessions share the GPU dynamically. However, some VDI customers need a dedicated virtual machine (VM) per user, either for performance or isolation reasons. For these kinds of workloads, customers are looking for a scale-down option to choose the right GPU size to meet the requirements.

Our customers needed cost-effective VM options that are sized appropriately with dedicated GPU resources for each user, starting from office workers running productivity apps to engineering workstations running GPU-powered workloads such as CAD, gaming, and simulation.

“With the new AMD-powered Workspot cloud desktops on Azure, we now have several perfectly sized cloud workstations for our different workloads. We’ve found the new entry level cloud workstation, using a fraction of the AMD GPU, is just right for our users running Microsoft Office 365 productivity tools and Adobe design tools (Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign). This fills in an additional much-needed point on the price/performance curve, which allows us to move even more users to the AMD-powered Workspot cloud desktops on Azure.” Andy Knauf, CIO, Mead & Hunt

Pick the right GPU virtual machine size for the VDI user profile

The NVv4 virtual machine series is designed specifically for the cloud virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and the desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) markets. We wanted to bring GPU processing power to the masses by putting a slice of the GPU in every desktop in the cloud. NVv4 enables enterprises to provide modern desktops in the cloud, with the ideal balance of price and performance for their workloads.

The following diagram shows how the different VM sizes align with the different VDI user profiles and requirements.

“Based on the application requirements of each engineer, we can dedicate all or a fraction of the AMD GPU to their Workspot workstation on Azure. This finer resolution of control gives us the financial edge we need to move more people to Workspot cloud desktops on Azure and increase our overall productivity.”  Eric Quinn, CTO, C&S Companies.

Predictable performance and security with hardware partitioning of the GPU

In Azure, the security of the customer's workload is always a top priority. SR-IOV based GPU partitioning provides a strong, hardware-backed security boundary with predictable performance for each virtual machine. We partition a single AMD Radeon Instinct MI 25 GPU and allocate it up to eight virtual machines. Each virtual machine can only access the GPU resources dedicated to them and the secure hardware partitioning prevents unauthorized access by other VMs.

“The Azure NVv4 VM series offers ArcGIS Pro users an exceptional graphical user experience. The four NVv4 sizes provide flexibility to accommodate workloads ranging from light GIS editing to 3D manipulation. ”  Ryan Danzey, Sr. Product Engineer – Performance, ESRI ArcGIS

Designed to work with Windows Virtual Desktop and VDI partners you use today

Customers in the VDI segment have many choices for remote protocol and infrastructure management. We worked closely with the key partners to ensure support for NVv4 virtual machines.

Windows Virtual Desktop supports the new NVv4 virtual machines with native WVD deployments that use RDP as well as solutions delivered by Citrix and VMware, our approved providers.

NVv4 virtual machines support Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), Teradici PCoIP, and HDX 3D Pro. The graphics API support covers DirectX 9 through 12, OpenGL 4.6, and Vulkan 1.1.

Windows Virtual Desktop, Citrix, Teradici, Workspot, and Nutanix Frame are some of the Azure VDI partners who have extensively validated the new NVv4 virtual machines and are ready to offer it to their customers.

"This is exciting news for our Citrix customers who are delivering Citrix Workspaces from the cloud. As we see more customers migrate to the cloud, the release of the NVv4 instance ensures that customers have more options to deliver graphically accelerated  Citrix workloads  on Azure while optimizing costs." – Carisa Stringer, Sr Director Workspace Services Product Marketing

"The new Azure NV_v4 series will give our Xi Frame customers a wider range of GPU options for their virtual desktop and application streaming needs. By enabling virtualized GPUs in the cloud, Azure now delivers a whole new level of value that unlocks a much broader set of use cases."  Carsten Puls, Sr. Director of Xi Frame at Nutanix.

“The flexibility that Azure NVv4 provides to share and access GPU resources as needed is a valuable feature that we see will benefit many Teradici customers. We are excited to be working with Microsoft and AMD to enable more flexible, cost-effective GPU options for virtual desktop and virtual workstation use cases such as AEC.”  Ziad Lammam, Vice President of Product Management at Teradici

“With the new AMD-powered Workspot cloud workstations and the use of industry leading cloud offerings in Azure, ASTI and Workspot are positioned to address the needs of the SMB market for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure in the AEC industry. These new AMD-powered systems will provide the computing power and graphics power of enterprise class systems, that allow an organization to spend less time managing their resources and more time completing projects.  They provide a balance of computing power and graphics performance without costly over provisioning.” Doug Dahlberg, Director of IT Operations, Applied Software (ASTI) – Workspot and Microsoft Partner

Next steps

For more information on topics covered here, see the following documentation:

NVv4 virtual machine documentation.
Virtual machine pricing.
AMD EPYC™ 7002-series.

Quelle: Azure

Microsoft named a leader in The Forrester New Wave: Functions-as-a-Service Platforms

We’re excited to share that Forrester has named Microsoft as a leader in the inaugural report, The Forrester New Wave™: Function-As-A-Service Platforms, Q1 2020 based on their evaluation of Azure Functions and integrated development tooling. We believe Forrester’s findings reflect the strong momentum of event-driven applications in Azure and our vision, crediting Azure Functions with“robust programming model and integration capabilities”, and also confirm Microsoft’s commitment to be the best technology partner for you as customers call out the responsiveness of Microsoft Azure's "engineering and support teams as key to their success.”

Best-in-class development experience

Azure Functions is an event-driven serverless compute platform with a programming model based on triggers and bindings for accelerated and simplified applications development. Fully integrated with other Azure services and development tools, its end-to-end development experience allows you to build and debug your functions locally on any major platform (Windows, macOS, and Linux), as well as deploy and monitor them in the cloud. You can even deploy the exact same functions code to other environments, such as your own infrastructure or your Kubernetes cluster, enabling seamless hybrid deployments.

In their report, Forrester noted Azure Functions programming model“supports a multitude of programming languages with extensive integration options, … and bindings for Azure Event Hub, and Azure Event Grid helps developers build event-driven microservices.”

Enterprise-grade FaaS platform

Enterprise customers like Chipotle love the velocity and productivity that event-driven architectures bring to developing applications. We are committed to building great experiences that enable the modernization of those enterprise workloads, and the Forrester report states that “strategic adopters of Azure will find that Azure Functions helps integrate Microsoft’s fast-expanding array of cloud services”, making that transformation journey easier. Some of our latest innovations are focused on the needs of enterprise customers, such as the Premium plan to host functions without cold-start for low latency workloads or PowerShell support enabling serverless automation scenarios for cloud and hybrid deployments.

In their report, Forrester also recognized Azure Functions as “a good fit for companies that need stateful functions” thanks to Durable Functions, an extension to the Azure Functions runtime that brings stateful and orchestration capabilities to serverless functions. Durable Functions stands alone in the serverless space, providing stateful functions and a way to define serverless workflows programmatically. Forrester mentioned specifically in the report that “clients modernizing enterprise apps will find that Durable Functions offers an alternative to refactoring existing business logic into bite-size stateless chunks."

Read the full Forrester report and learn more about Azure Functions today.

If you have any feedback or questions, please reach us on Twitter, GitHub, StackOverflow or UserVoice.
Quelle: Azure

Plan migration of physical servers using Azure Migrate

At Microsoft Ignite, we announced new Microsoft Azure Migrate assessment capabilities that further simplify migration planning. In this post, I will talk about how you can plan migration of physical servers. Using this feature, you can also plan migration of virtual machines of any hypervisor or cloud. You can get started right away with these features by creating an Azure Migrate project or using an existing project.

Previously, Azure Migrate: Server Assessment only supported VMware and Hyper-V virtual machine assessments for migration to Azure. At Ignite 2019, we added physical server support for assessment features like Azure suitability analysis, migration cost planning, performance-based rightsizing, and application dependency analysis. You can now plan at-scale, assessing up to 35K physical servers in one Azure Migrate project. If you use VMware or Hyper-V as well, you can discover and assess both physical and virtual servers in the same project. You can create groups of servers, assess by group and refine the groups further using application dependency information.

While this feature is in preview, the preview is covered by customer support and can be used for production workloads. Let us look at how the assessment helps you plan migration.

Azure suitability analysis

The assessment checks Azure support for each server discovered and determines whether the server can be migrated as-is to Azure. If incompatibilities are found, remediation guidance is automatically provided. You can customize your assessment by changing its properties, and recomputing the assessment. Among other customizations, you can choose a virtual machine series of your choice and specify the uptime of the workloads you will run in Azure.

Cost estimation and sizing

Assessment also provides detailed cost estimates. Performance-based rightsizing assessments can be used to optimize on cost; the performance data of your on-premise server is used to recommend a suitable Azure Virtual Machine and disk SKU. This helps to optimize on cost and right-size as you migrate servers that might be over-provisioned in your on-premise data center. You can apply subscription offers and Reserved Instance pricing on the cost estimates.

Dependency analysis

Once you have established cost estimates and migration readiness, you can plan your migration phases. Using the dependency analysis feature, you can understand which workloads are interdependent and need to be migrated together. This also helps ensure you do not leave critical elements behind on-premise. You can visualize the dependencies in a map or extract the dependency data in a tabular format. You can divide your servers into groups and refine the groups for migration by reviewing the dependencies.

Assess your physical servers in four simple steps

Create an Azure Migrate project and add the Server Assessment solution to the project.
Set up the Azure Migrate appliance and start discovery of your server. To set up discovery, the server names or IP addresses are required. Each appliance supports discovery of 250 servers. You can set up more than one appliance if required.
Once you have successfully set up discovery, create assessments and review the assessment reports.
Use the application dependency analysis features to create and refine server groups to phase your migration.

When you are ready to migrate the servers to Azure, you can use Server Migration to carry out the migration. You can read more about migrating physical servers here. In the coming months, we will add support for application discovery and agentless dependency analysis on physical servers as well.

Note that the inventory metadata gathered is persisted in the geography you select while creating the project. You can select a geography of your choice. Server Assessment is available today in Asia Pacific, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Europe, France, India, Japan, Korea, United Kingdom, and United States geographies.

Get started right away by creating an Azure Migrate project. In the upcoming blogs, we will talk about import-based assessments, application discovery, and agentless dependency analysis.

Resources to get started

Tutorial on how to assess physical servers using Azure Migrate: Server Assessment.
Prerequisites for assessment of physical servers
Guide on how to plan an assessment for a large-scale environment. Each appliance supports discovery of 250 servers. You can discover more servers by adding
Tutorial on how to migrate physical servers using Azure Migrate: Server Migration.

Quelle: Azure

IoT Signals energy report: Embracing transparent, affordable, and sustainable energy

The increased use of renewables, resiliency challenges, and sustainability concerns are all disrupting the energy industry today. New technologies are accelerating the way we source, store, and distribute energy. With IoT, we can gain new insights about the physical world that enables us to optimize and create more efficient processes, reduce energy waste, and track specific consumption. This is a great opportunity for IoT to support power and utilities (P&U) companies across grid assets, electric vehicles, energy optimization, load balancing, and emissions monitoring.

We've recently published a new IoT Signals report focused on the P&U industry. The report provides an industry pulse on the state of IoT adoption to help inform us how to better serve our partners and customers, as well as help energy companies develop their own IoT strategies. We surveyed global decision-makers in P&U organizations to deliver an industry-level view of the IoT ecosystem, including adoption rates, related technology trends, challenges, and benefits of IoT.

The study found that while IoT is almost universally adopted in P&U, it comes with complexity. Companies are commonly deploying IoT to improve the efficiency of operations and employee productivity, but can be challenged by skills and knowledge shortages, privacy and security concerns, and timing and deployment issues. To summarize the findings:

Top priorities and use cases for IoT in power and utilities

Optimizing processes through automation is critical for P&U IoT use. Top IoT uses cases in P&U include automation-heavy processes such as smart grid automation, energy optimization and load balancing, smart metering, and predictive load forecasting. In support of this, artificial intelligence (AI) is often a component of energy IoT solutions, and they are often budgeted together. Almost all adopters have either already integrated AI into an IoT solution or are considering integration.
Using IoT to improve both data security and employee safety is a top priority. Almost half of decision-makers we talked to use IoT to make their IT practices more secure. Another third are implementing IoT to make their workplaces safer, as well as improve the safety of their employees.
P&U companies also leverage IoT to secure their physical assets. Many P&U companies use IoT to secure various aspects of their operations through equipment management and infrastructure maintenance.
The future is bright with IoT adoption continuing to focus on automation, with growth in adoption for use cases related to optimizing energy and creating more efficient maintenance systems.

Today, customers around the world are telling us they are heavily investing in four common use cases for IoT in the energy sector:

Grid asset maintenance

Visualize your grid’s topology, gather data from grid assets, and define rules to trigger alerts. Use these insights to predict maintenance and provide more safety oversight. Prevent failures and avoid critical downtime by monitoring the performance and condition of your equipment.

Energy optimization and load balancing

Balance energy supply and demand to alleviate pressure on the grid and prevent serious power outages. Avoid costly infrastructure upgrades and gain flexibility by using distributed energy resources to drive energy optimization.

Emissions monitoring and reduction

Monitor emissions in near real-time and make your emissions data more readily available. Work towards sustainability targets and clean energy adoption by enabling greenhouse gas and carbon accounting and reporting.

E-mobility

Remotely maintain and service electric vehicle (EV) charging points that support various charging speeds and vehicle types. Make it easier to own and operate electric vehicles by incentivizing ownership and creating new visibility into energy usage.

Learn more about IoT for energy

Read about the real world customers doing incredible things with IoT for energy where you can learn about market leaders like Schneider Electric making remote asset management easier using predictive analytics.

"Traditionally, machine learning is something that has only run in the cloud … Now, we have the flexibility to run it in the cloud or at the edge—wherever we need it to be." Matt Boujonnier, Analytics Application Architect, Schneider Electric.

Read the blog where we announced Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030 and discussed our partner Vattenfall delivering a new, highly transparent 24/7 energy matching solution; a first-of-its-kind approach that gives customers the ability to choose the green energy they want and ensure their consumption matches that goal using Azure IoT.

We are committed to helping P&U customers bring their vision to life with IoT, and this starts with simplifying and securing IoT. Our customers are embracing IoT as a core strategy to drive better outcomes for energy providers, energy users, and the planet. We are heavily investing in this space, committing $5 billion in IoT and intelligent edge innovation by 2022, and growing our IoT and intelligent edge partner ecosystem.
 
When IoT is foundational to a transformation strategy, it can have a significantly positive impact on the bottom line, customer experiences, and products. We are invested in helping our partners, customers, and the broader industry to take the necessary steps to address barriers to success. Read the full IoT Signals energy report and learn how we're helping power and utilities companies embrace the future and unlock new opportunities with IoT.
Quelle: Azure

Reimagining healthcare with Azure IoT

Providers, payors, pharmaceuticals, and life sciences companies are leading the next wave of healthcare innovation by utilizing connected devices. From continuous patient monitoring, to optimizing operations for manufacturers and cold-chain supply tracking for the pharmaceutical industry, the healthcare industry has embraced IoT technology to improve patient outcomes and operations.

In our latest IoT Signals for Healthcare research, we spoke with over 150 health organizations about the role that IoT will play in helping them deliver better health outcomes in the years to come. Across the ecosystem, 85 percent see IoT as “critical” to their success, with 78 percent planning to increase their investment in IoT technologies over the next few years. Real-time data from connected devices and sensors provides benefits across the health ecosystem, from manufacturers and pharmaceuticals to health providers and patients.

For health providers, IoT unlocks efficiencies for clinical staff and equipment:

Reduces human error.
Ensures regulatory compliance when exchanging patient health data across systems.
Coordinates the productivity of medical professionals across clinical facilities.

For manufacturers, IoT creates new digital feedback loops connecting their employees, facilities, products, and end customers. Real-time data can help:

Reduce costly downtime with predictive maintenance.
Improve sustainable practices by reducing waste and ensuring worker safety.
Contribute to improved product quality and quantity.

For the pharmaceutical industry, IoT provides greater traceability for inventory along a supply chain:

Improved visibility into environmental conditions.
Reduced costly inventory spoilage.
Increased control against theft or counterfeiting.

For end patients, IoT can improve health outcomes with continuous patient monitoring:

Reduces the need for unnecessary readmissions.
Improves treatment success rates by providing continuous data to care professionals.
Personalizes care based on patient needs.

In this blog, we’ll cover how our portfolio can support different IoT solution needs for software developers, hardware developers, and healthcare customers. We’ll also cover new product updates for healthcare solution builders, review a sample solution architecture, and showcase two case studies that illustrate different approaches for building innovative healthcare solutions. To further explore applications of IoT in healthcare and customer case studies, head to our IoT in Healthcare page.

Building healthcare IoT solutions with Azure IoT

As Microsoft and its global partners continue to build solutions that empower healthcare organizations around the world, a key question continues to face IoT decision makers: whether to build a solution from scratch or buy an existing solution that fits their needs.

From ensuring device-to-cloud security with Azure Sphere to providing multiple approaches for device management and connectivity with Platform as a Service (PaaS) options or a managed app platform, Azure IoT provides the most comprehensive IoT and Edge product portfolio on the market, designed to meet the diverse needs of healthcare solution builders.

Solution builders who want to invest their resources in designing, maintaining, and customizing IoT systems from the ground up can do so with our growing portfolio of IoT platform services, leveraging Azure IoT Hub as a starting point.

While this approach may be tempting for many, often solution builders struggle when growing their pilot into a globally scalable IoT solution. This process introduces significant complexity to an IoT architecture, requiring expertise across cloud and device security, DevOps, compliance, and more. For this reason, many solution builders might be better suited for starting with a managed platform approach with Azure IoT Central. Using more than two dozen Azure services, Azure IoT Central is designed to continually evolve with the latest service updates and seamlessly accompany solution builders along their IoT journey from pilot to production. With predictable pricing, white labeling, healthcare-specific application templates, and extensibility, solution builders can focus their time on how their device insights can improve outcomes, instead of common infrastructure questions like ingesting device data or ensuring disaster recovery.

New tools to accelerate building a healthcare IoT solution

Over the past year, we’ve been working hard to create new tools to make IoT solution development easier for our healthcare partners and customers:

Azure IoT Central app templates.
Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) Connector for Azure.

To help you put all of these tools together, we’ve also published a reference architecture diagram for continuous patient monitoring solutions.

Continuous patient monitoring reference architecture

Azure IoT Central app templates

Last November, we announced the first IoT Central healthcare application template, designed for continuous patient monitoring applications. In-patient monitoring and remote patient monitoring are top of mind for many healthcare organizations; monitoring is the number one application of IoT in healthcare today, according to our survey of health organizations (mentioned above).

Application templates help solution builders get started even faster by providing scenario-specific resources such as:

Sample device operator dashboards.
Sample device templates.
Preconfigured rules and alerts.

An IoT device operator might set alerts to be notified when patient devices have low battery levels or exceed a certain threshold of temperature, so that they can take timely action to prevent devices losing connectivity, being damaged, or losing battery. Furthermore, the application template has rich documentation detailing integration with the Azure API for FHIR, ensuring scalable compliance with the HL7 FHIR standard (more on this in the next section).

Outside of using existing App Templates, solution builders can also leverage the “Custom App” option to build IoT applications for other healthcare scenarios as well.

IoMT FHIR Connector for Azure

Interoperability continues to be a huge challenge and critical for most healthcare organizations looking to use healthcare data in innovative ways. Microsoft proudly announced the general availability of our own FHIR server offering, Azure API for FHIR, in October 2019. We are now further enriching the FHIR ecosystem with the IoMT FHIR Connector for Azure, a connector designed to ingest, transform, and store IoT protected health information (PHI) data in FHIR compatible format.

Innovative healthcare companies share their IoT stories

In addition to rich industry insights like those found in IoT Signals for Healthcare and our previously published stories from Stryker, Gojo, and Wipro, we are releasing two new case stories. They detail the decisions, trade-offs, processes, and results of top healthcare organizations investing in IoT solutions, as well as the healthcare solution builders supporting them. These case studies showcase different approaches to building an IoT solution, based on the unique needs of their business. Read more about how these companies are implementing and winning with their IoT investments.

ThoughtWire and Schneider Electric leverage IoT for hospital operations

Clinical environments are managed by traditionally disconnected systems (facility management, clinical operations, inventory management, and more), operated by entirely separate teams. This makes it difficult to holistically manage and optimize clinical operations. Schneider Electric, a global expert in facilities management, partnered with ThoughtWire, a specialist in operations management systems, to deliver an end-to-end solution for facilities and clinical operations management. The joint Smart Hospital solution uses Azure’s IoT platform to help hospitals and clinics reduce costs, minimize their carbon footprint, and promote better staff satisfaction, patient experiences and health outcomes.

“We don’t just want to understand how the facility operates, we want to understand how patients and clinical staff interact with that infrastructure,” says Chris Roberts, Healthcare Solution Architect at Schneider Electric. “That includes everything to do with patient experience and patient safety. And when you talk about those things, the clinical world and the infrastructure world start to merge and connect. Working with ThoughtWire, we bridge the gap between those two worlds and drive performance improvements.”

To learn more, read the case study here.

Sensoria Health creates a new gold standard for managing diabetic foot ulcers

Diabetic Foot Ulcers (DFUs) are the leading cause of hospitalizations for diabetics, with a notoriously high treatment failure rate (over 75 percent), and an annual cost of $40 billion globally. To improve treatment success, Sensoria partnered with leading diabetic foot boot manufacturer, Optima Molliter, to create the Motus Smart Solution. The solution enables clinicians to remotely monitor patients wearing removable offloading devices (casts) when they leave the clinic and to track patient compliance against recommended care plans, enabling more personalized–and more impactful–care.

Sensoria turned to Azure IoT Central to develop a solution that would handle device management at scale while ensuring compliance in storing and sharing patient data. They leveraged the Continuous Patient Monitoring app template as their starting point to quickly design, launch, and scale their solution. With native IoMT Connector for FHIR integration, the template ensures that patient data is ultimately stored and shared in a secure and compliant format.

As stated by Davide Vigano, Cofounder and CEO of Sensoria, “We needed to quickly build enterprise-class applications for both doctors and patients to use with the device, send data from the device in a way that would help people remain compliant with HIPAA and other similar privacy-related legislation around the world, and find a way for the device’s data to easily flow from clinician to clinician across the very siloed healthcare industry. Using Azure IoT Central helped us deliver on all those requirements in a very short period of time.”

To learn more, read the case study here.

We look forward to seeing healthcare organizations continue to innovate with IoT to drive better health outcomes. We’ll continue to build the tools and platforms to empower our partners to invent with purpose.

Getting started

Explore other case studies and applications of IoT in healthcare.
Check out the IoMT FHIR Connector for Azure.
Try out the IoT Central Continuous Patient Monitoring template.

Quelle: Azure

Announcing preview of Backup Reports

We recently announced a new solution, Backup Explorer, to enable you as a backup administrator to perform real-time monitoring of your backups, helping you achieve increased efficiency in your day-to-day operations.

But what if you could also be proactive in the way you manage your backup estate? What if there was a way to unlock the latent power of your backup metadata to make more informed business decisions?

For instance, any business would be well-served following a systematic way of forecasting backup usage. Often, this involves analyzing how backup storage has increased over time for a given tenant, subscription, resource group, or for individual workloads. Such analysis requires the paired ability to aggregate data over a long period of time and present it in a way that allows the reader to quickly derive insights.

Today, we are pleased to announce the public preview of Backup Reports. Leveraging Azure Monitor Logs and Azure Workbooks, Backup Reports serve as a one-stop destination for tracking usage, auditing of backups and restores, and identifying key trends at different levels of granularity.

With our reports, you can answer questions including ‘Which Backup Item(s) consume the most storage?’, ‘Which machines have had consistently misbehaving backups?’, ‘What are the main causes of backup job failure?’, and many more.

Key benefits

Boundary-less reporting: Backup Reports work across multiple workload types that are supported by Azure Backup. This includes Azure workloads such as Azure Virtual Machines, SQL in Azure Virtual Machines, SAP HANA/ASE in Azure Virtual Machines, as well as on-premises workloads including Data Protection Manager (DPM), Azure Backup Server, and Azure Backup Agent. The reports can aggregate information across multiple vaults, subscriptions, and regions. If you are an Azure Lighthouse user with delegated access to your customers’ subscriptions/Log Analytics workspaces, you can also view reporting data across all your tenants within a single pane of glass.
Rich slicing, dicing, and drill-down capabilities: Backup Reports offers a range of filters and visualization experiences that enable you, as a backup administrator, to easily scope down your analysis and derive valuable insights. You can also slice and dice on backup item-specific properties, such as the backup item type, protection state, and more.
Native Azure-based experience: Backup Reports can be viewed right on the Azure portal without the need to purchase any additional software licenses. This native integration also makes it possible to seamlessly navigate to (and from) the individual dashboards for backup items and vaults and take action.

Note, Backup Reports will start showing data for Azure file share backup for each region once Azure file share backup becomes generally available.

Getting started

To start using Backup Reports, you will first need to configure your vaults to send diagnostics data to Log Analytics. To make this task easier, we have provided a built-in Azure Policy that auto-enables Log Analytics diagnostics for all vaults in a chosen scope.

Once all your vaults have been configured to send data to Log Analytics, you can simply navigate to any vault and click on the Backup Reports menu item.

 

This opens a report that will aggregate data across your entire backup estate. Simply select one or more LA Workspaces to view data and you’ll be ready to go.

Next steps

Read the Backup Reports Documentation to learn how to make the most of your reports.
New to Azure Backup? Sign up for a free Azure trial subscription.
Need help? Reach out to Azure Backup forum for support or browse Azure Backup documentation.
Follow us on Twitter @AzureBackup for the latest news and updates.

Quelle: Azure