Azure Updates: IoT adoption; GPU monitoring; Maps Weather Services; Open Source Day

Microsoft GM Shirley Strachan highlighted surging IoT adoption in the Asia-Pacific region. Australian organizations have the highest reported rates of IoT adoption of any country, with widespread use in mining and smart grid scenarios. Ninety four percent of recent IoT adoption in places like China stems from “smart spaces” including smart cities projects, whereas Japan—with a long tradition of manufacturing—has added considerable IoT capacity in factories.

Microsoft team member Cormac Garvey made the case for GPU monitoring with Azure Monitor. GPU metrics are important to monitor because there are often many parallel HPC and AI apps running GPU. The Nvidia Datacenter GPU Monitoring framework allows access to multiple low-level GPU counters to give some insights about GPU health. Garvey explained that the gpu_data_collector.py Python script can be used to a Log Analytics workspace, pulling DCGM dmon metrics. Alternatively, kusto queries can serve a similar purpose.

Microsoft expanded Azure Maps Weather Services to include three new services: Historical Weather, Air Quality API, and Tropical Storms API. The data—including historical weather data going back as much as 40 years—is sourced AccuWeather.