Azure Insights: P1 and P2 licenses; Azure Reservations; Azure Monitor alerts; Exams; Monitoring disk space

This week, Azure pros share their advice on assigning P1 and P2 licenses, saving money with Azure Reservation, Monitor alerts and more.

Assigning mutually exclusive P1 and P2 licenses

Microsoft MVP Sander Berkouwer, writing on The Things That Are Better Left Unspoken noted that Dynamic Memberships offer a way to get around possible overlaps between the Azure AD P1 and P2 licenses. In the community, premium Azure AD licenses are informally known as P1 licenses, while the "more elaborate and costly" level is known as P2. Dynamic group memberships cut down on the manual work of adding or removing users from groups.

To get setup, a user needs to sign in with global administrator privileges and run simple code on PowerShell to pull information on the licenses available. Through the Azure portal, they can navigate to Active Directory and create a new group name, type, description and assign users. Dynamic membership rules give a way to prevent overlap between licenses.

Saving money with Azure Reservations

Microsoft senior cloud advocate Thomas Maurer looked at Azure VM Reservations as a way to save on costs. Although most services are priced in a Pay-As-You-Go model, some customers need to run VMs for years at a time. For these purchasers, Microsoft offers a chance to "reserve" and plan capacity one to three years in advance and offers cost discounts. A recent update means reservations can be paid up front or monthly. Maurer wrote:

No worries, you can mix Azure reservations for your predictable capacity needs, with the Pay-As-You-Go model for your unpredictable capacity needs. While purchasing reservations is only a few simple steps in the Azure portal, we also understand that your workload and application needs may change, and exchanging reservations is easy. You can even cancel your reservation at any time and get the remaining months returned for a termination fee.

Savings of up to 80 percent are possible if customers combine Azure Hybrid Benefit and Reserved VM Instances.

Keeping track of Azure Monitor alerts

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