Azure Insights: Auto refresh Azure dashboard; Azure Stack HCI; Traffic Manager; Active Directory Connect; Lighthouse

This week, Azure pros look into auto refreshing the Azure dashboard, Azure Stack HCI, Traffic Manager and more.

Auto refreshing Azure dashboard

Richard Hooper, writing on Pixel Robots, shared a strange quirk of working with Azure doing Log Analytics monitoring. Outputs can be pinned to Azure Dashboard, but the dashboard does not auto-refresh. Fortunately, there is a way to get it updated. Hooper recommended opening a PowerShell window or WSL bash prompt.

He logged into Azure portal and navigated the dashboard resource. By selecting the Monitoring Reader option under access control, he was able to setup a newly created user on a monitoring screen. For situations using Google Chrome, users can add install a tab auto-refresh plugin and even define the refresh interval in seconds.

Looking into Azure Stack HCI

Bert Wolters, writing on AzureMan, compared Azure Stack with Azure Stack HCI. Azure Stack has existed since 2017, offering HPE hardware co-selected with Microsoft and a combination of standardized hardware and configurations. Users selecting the offering get to choose between four and 16 nodes, together with out-of-band management, 10 GbE LEAF switches and Hardware Lifecycle Host.

Wolters argued that although they have similar names, Azure Stack HCI, launched in March, 2019, is much different than Azure Stack. For instance, it uses Windows Admin Center instead of Azure portal for management and relies on Windows Server 2019 instead of Windows Server 2016. In contrast to Azure Stack, it can access Hyper-V Manager and doesn't have the same resource deployments. Azure Stack is best suited for use cases in IoT, financial services, smart cities or predictive maintenance while Azure Stack HCI is more geared to consolidating data centers, remote offices, disaster recovery and business-critical workloads. He wrote:

Some of the software components (Operating System and Storage Spaces Direct) are about the only things the two offerings have in common. Azure Stack is an on-premises implementation of Azure Resource Manager, the core software that runs the public Microsoft Azure cloud…. AzureStack is a locked-down, highly standardized, managed environment, meaning you really can't use the lower-level virtualization tools or look under the hood as deep as you might like.

Using Azure Traffic Manager

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