Azure Insights: Azure Bastion; CPU monitoring; ARM templates; Azure Stack infrastructure; SSL problems; Azure AD passwords

This week, Azure pros discuss the ins and outs of Azure Bastion, monitoring CPU usage, ARM template deployment issues and more.

Looking into Azure Bastion

Microsoft senior cloud advocate Thomas Maurer, blogging independently, commented on the announcement of Azure Bastion. The new offering to enhance VM security is in preview, available in regions like East US, West US, West Europe, Australia East and Japan East. Bastion eliminates the need for an RDP client and spares users from needing to assign public IP addresses to Azure VMs among other capabilities.

Maurer explained how to install the Bastion Host in a VNet. It integrates natively with Azure Portal and users can plug in the details for their VM, which opens an SSL RDP session. The announcement is just the beginning, with Microsoft planning to add MFA and Azure Active Directory support in the near future.

Monitoring CPU usage with Log Analytics

Richard Hooper, writing on Pixel Robots, went over the steps needed to monitor servers with Azure. To begin with, users need to have the Azure Monitor agent installed on VMs and be ready to extract data sources—in fact, it's even possible to monitor non-Azure servers. Hooper decided to pull performance counters. He shared code to run a query and defined a start date, in this case, how many hours the chart will cover.

ARM template deployment issues

Danny McDermott, writing on Crying Cloud, discovered an issue with an ARM template which he had previously deployed successfully on both Azure and Azure Stack. He shared a screenshot of the parameters when deploying it to Azure Stack and "validation errors" alert that came back from the system.

McDermott experimented with deploying it on Azure with no issue and tried it on version 1902 again with no problems. However on version 1903, the error popped up again. It turned out that the error stemmed from something as simple as placement of apostrophes around a section of the parameter code and changing it quickly resolved the issue.

Integrated system updates for Azure Stack

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