When you need to grant access to Azure SQL PaaS database, you can use following T-SQL scripts.

When you build your environment in Azure Cloud using IaaC (Infrastructure as a Code) approach, sometimes you will face issues during re-deployment. That's because guys from Microsoft update their VM images with new versions of software. As a result, these new images have new IDs and you must update your ARM or Powershell scripts.

I wrote a script that will help to find new versions of images.

Z for Zabbix

As we all know, monitoring is a huge part of operations and, in my case, DevOps activities. It's one of the elephants, on which any software maintenance rely on, I would say.

Back to the ground, Azure Cloud is a nice platform, but still, it doesn't have "real" monitoring solution. Not for VMs, nor for any other it's resources. You can say - it has OMS and Azure Monitor, but I've encountered so many limitations and issues with it... Well, my point - is to develop your own bicycle monitoring system to match your environments and needs. 

Today I'll try to introduce my solution which is: highly avaliable, free and cloud-based.

June 25, 2020
During last year, I've been actively refactoring this solution and finally I've updated this article. All code moved to GitHub where you can clone it to your PC and update as needed.

Also, I've removed all comments as they're not relevant anymore.

Hey!

Today is the great day, as I'm finally going to share my approach to monitoring of Azure Cloud resources with Zabbix. There is no built-in solution for monitoring Azure with 3rd-party software (at least, I know nothing about that), so we'll need to build our own. Before you start configuring\scripting, please make sure you're familiar with most common Zabbix features, because the task is not trivial.

Azure monitoring

Why do we need all this? Well, I've encountered a number of issues, problems and limitations while trying to use native Azure tools - Log Analytics(to paint graphs) and Monitor (to configure alerting). Metrics could appear there with big delays, problems with writing queries, triggering - is also a problem.

So, we've decided to adopt Zabbix for monitoring of Azure...

While Azure Cloud is a great solution for your application and stuff, there's still lack of essential features for building cost-efficient environments. What I mean here?

In software development process, you will need at least two non-production environments:

• Development
• Testing

Those will not be used so frequently as production tier, mostly by development\QA teams. And it's obvious you can save some money for your company by scaling Azure resources down or turning them off completely during night or weekend.

If your Kubernetes Azure AKS cluster is old enough, especially in development environments, it will definitely run out of disk space, because AKS will store all container images (and in DEV environments they're changing quite often) on the disk.

I wasn't able to find, how often AKS engine is executing some clean operation (but it does, absolutely). However, in my case, space usage reached those already critical 80% and continued to grow. Here's how can run cleaning manually.

When you create Azure Kubernetes Service cluster (AKS), you can specify Log Analytics resource for logging and monitoring of Kubernetes resources: pods, services, configmaps, etc. This thing is actually installing Log Analytics agent inside your cluster (there will be several pods and related resources like configmaps), which then will send stdout and stderroutputs from pods to Log Analytics.

Unfortunately, the schema of these logs inside Log Analytics is quite complex, mostly because that the log record is coming from container, but not the pod, so they have multiple tables, which we must connect to get human-readable logging data.

My customer require that we have supported versions of software installed, and I'm forced to upgrade Kubernetes as well according to the support policy of Kubernetes releases in Azure.

Last Kubernetes 1.24+ upgrade was not very clean - Nginx-ingress controller failed, and all our applications stopped responding.