Azure Updates: COVID-19; Monitor; FastTrack; Azure Government; Form Recognizer; Connection Monitor

As the global COVID-19  pandemic continued to spread, countries throughout the world announced lockdowns and expanded closures leading to market free fall in some sectors. With much of its workforce now working from home, Microsoft took steps to keep users up to date and roll out new capabilities.

Amidst widespread work remote orders, workers in Europe were frustrated to encounter a Teams outage on March 16, according to ZDNet. The outage lasted several hours before Microsoft indicated a mitigation, but needed to reopen its process due to continued problems. Fortunately, chat problems were resolved within about six hours. But in spite of that hiccup, Teams is neck in neck with Zoom as the most downloaded application for mobile devices in many markets.

Monitor is now generally available for VMs, displaying performance trends and dependencies, powered by Log Analytics. User can set up the new service with the Virtual Machine Scale Sets resource blade to see results for a single scale set or take stock of VM hotspots at scale by drawing on resource utilization and performance trends.