Microsoft Support & Discussions

This post was authored by Andrey Mirskiy and Diego Fanesi. Welcome to the first post of our series on how to use Azure Databricks SQL with Power BI. In this article, we will focus on how to connect to a Databricks SQL Warehouse from Power BI and query your Delta Lake to populate your dashboards. This scalable approach allows you to efficiently run queries on large data volumes, generating more business value from your datasets. Many customers have adopted this architecture for their Business Intelligence workloads. Here is a short list of companies that are using Azure Databricks with Power BI today: Pandora Via CBC Australian Rail Track Corporation …

This paper explores the relationship between complexity, entropy, and chaos theory in the context of cloud application design and management. Discussing the importance of understanding business needs, setting RTO and RPO objectives, conducting effective risk assessments, understanding SLA and calculating SLAs when building Cloud Native Systems and steps to help mitigate down time and increase system availability using Azure Availability Zones. The paper concludes by emphasising the need for careful consideration when designing and managing complex systems, as the risk of failure increases with complexity and through the use of availability zones, risk of failure ca…

I recently saw a discussion on what value does the cloud actually bring to people. Why migrate? Beyond the most stated reasons, elasticity (aka add a host, VM, app or container on the fly), resiliency with Azure regions, Availability sets and zones. Maybe we should ask why wouldn't you migrate applications that make sense to move from on-premises to Azure? There will always be debate on what's right for your organization but there are many ways you can benefit from cloud. I thought it simplest to start with a web application. These can be run on a physical server, a virtual machine, a container but you can also run them as an Application Service in Azure. Have…

Today, we're announcing the availability of a much-requested feature for IT administrators planning and deploying Windows feature and quality updates—email alerts! Starting today, you can get notified about Windows known issues documented in the Windows release health section of the Microsoft 365 admin center. This enables you to easily and quickly learn about issues related to Windows updates and make informed decisions about rolling out an update across your environment. When you sign up, you'll receive emails about new issues for the versions of the Windows operating system you support, as well as updates to known issues such as: Changes in issue status New wor…

App Service continues to invest in migration tooling to allow customers to easily migrate their web apps to App Service. The current set of tools enable discovery, assessment, and migration of ASP. Net web app across various scenarios and scopes viz. standalone web app, single IIS server and even a datacenter. To read more about these migration tools please refer to ASP. Net web app Migration to Azure App Service using PowerShell Scripts. To successfully migrate, and subsequently operate, an application workload in Azure App Service several qualifying prerequisites must be satisfied. Broadly there are three categories of pre-requisite checks to review and confirm w…

Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence (Defender TI) helps streamline security analyst triage, incident response, threat hunting, and vulnerability management workflows, aggregating and enriching critical threat information in an easy-to-use interface. At Microsoft Secure, we announced new features, including that Defender TI is now available to licensed customers within the Microsoft 365 Defender (M365 Defender) portal, placing its powerful threat intelligence side-by-side with the advanced XDR functionality of M365 Defender. For Defender users, Defender TI will now be quickly accessible and easy to reference for swift context about threat actors and their tools a…

As organizations continue to collect and store large volumes of data in their data lakes, managing this data effectively becomes increasingly important. One key aspect of this is implementing Slow Change Dimension type 2, which allows organizations to track historical data by creating multiple records for a given natural key in the dimensional tables with separate surrogate keys and/or different version numbers. In this blog post we will address the following scenario: a customer wants to implement Slow Change Dimension type 2 on top of their data lake. For this example, we will use Serverless SQL Pool to demonstrate how this can be done. Additionally, in the next …

We’re looking for Microsoft 365 administrators to take our new Exam MS-102: Microsoft 365 Administrator, currently in beta. If you have subject matter expertise in deploying and managing Microsoft 365 and in performing Microsoft 365 tenant-level implementation and administration of cloud and hybrid environments, be sure to check it out. The Microsoft 365 Certified: Enterprise Administrator Expert certification will be renamed the Microsoft 365 Certified: Administrator Expert certification. The updated certification name more closely aligns with current workplace opportunities, and it better fits the scope of work, since the role and skills apply to organizations of…

Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server is a fully managed database service offered by Microsoft Azure for PostgreSQL databases. It provides a flexible and customizable deployment option for PostgreSQL, which allows users to choose the compute and storage resources that best fit their workload requirements. Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of database availability monitoring in Azure Database for Postgres Flexible Server. This new feature provides you with real-time insights into the availability of your database, so you can quickly identify and resolve any issues that may arise. With database availability monitoring, you can: View the s…

Today, we're announcing the availability of a much-requested feature for IT administrators planning and deploying Windows feature and quality updates—email alerts! Starting today, you can get notified about Windows known issues documented in the Windows release health section of the Microsoft 365 admin center. This enables you to easily and quickly learn about issues related to Windows updates and make informed decisions about rolling out an update across your environment. When you sign up, you'll receive emails about new issues for the versions of the Windows operating system you support, as well as updates to known issues such as: Changes in issue status New wor…

Are you a developer looking to start creating apps for Microsoft Teams? We are delighted to share with you the video playlist. Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code is a tool for building apps for Microsoft Teams, fast. It is the quickest way to create, build, debug, test, and deploy apps for Microsoft Teams. This playlist teaches you basic concepts of building apps for Microsoft Teams using Teams Toolkit. You will learn how to: Get started Build a bot Build a tab Use Teams JavaScript library Deploy your app to Azure Happy coding! All videos were recorded in the weekly Microsoft 365 Platform and Power P…

Introduction and Purpose: The fundamental model for Network Connectivity in Azure is Hub and Spoke. As compared to Azure Virtual WAN, the end user has more granular control of the routing and the ability to deploy shared resources on the Hub to be consumed by the Virtual Network (VNet) peers attached to it (Spokes). However, the existing official documentation to attain a Multi Hub and Spoke topology refers to models that include dynamic routing in the Hub using Azure Route Server and Network Virtual Appliances (NVA) which requires a level of complexity as a Network Administrator including the use of protocols like Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and Virtual extensi…

*Thank you to Jing Nghik for assisting with the creation of this toolkit and to the Customer Connection Program for testing this solution.* *This is going to be a long blog. I recommend reading it but alternatively there will be a video recording soon that will cover the workbook. TLDR: This workbook serves as a toolkit for data collection rules to make creating, editing, and monitoring DCRs in an environment easier. It is available today in the Workbooks Gallery within Microsoft Sentinel.* It can be a little confusing when it comes to creating, monitoring, and modifying data collection rules from Azure Monitor. These components are split up between Azure Lo…

The article is published here on the Microsoft Security and Compliance Blog: Microsoft Purview DevOps policies now includes all the typical permissions for SQL support personnel Figure 1: Screenshot of DevOps policies Continue reading...

Hello Folks, Azure Networking is the foundation of your infrastructure in Azure. Each month we bring you an update on What’s new in Azure Networking. This month is a little late since we've been traveling to conferences. We Recorded this one from the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit. In this blog post, we’ll cover what's new with Azure Networking in April 2023. Azure Virtual Network Manager for Hub and Spoke Connectivity (AVNM) If you’ve had to manage lots of virtual networks, peering connections, and Network Security Groups (NSG) Azure Virtual Network Manager (AVNM) is here to help. It’s a hi…

There has been a significant acceleration in digital transformation of the IT environments, with organizations moving their workloads to the cloud and benefitting from consolidated management and operations of their otherwise intricate and dispersed IT infrastructure. While digital spending rapidly increased, organizations are now focused on optimizing costs. Infrastructure automation is being prioritized to maintain efficient operations (cost savings, streamlined operations, and accurate results) across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. Azure Automation offers a comprehensive platform for cloud-based execution of PowerShell & Python scripts as…

Introduction Microsoft Defender for APIs, a new plan in Defender for Cloud, offers full lifecycle protection, detection, and response coverage for APIs published in Azure API Management. One of the main capabilities is the ability to detect exploits of the OWASP API Top 10 vulnerabilities through runtime observations of anomalies using machine learning-based and rule-based detections. This blog will outline the steps for simulating an action that will trigger an alert for one of your API endpoints through Defender for APIs. In this scenario, the alert will be for the detection of a suspicious user agent. Validation Steps If you don’t have an API End…

Last week, I had the privilege of attending the RSA Conference in San Francisco. RSA is an annual event that brings together professionals across the security industry to discuss the latest trends and challenges in cloud security. The conference provides a platform for attendees to learn from experts, network with peers, and explore new products and technologies. These are three lessons in cloud security I took away from RSA 2023: Innovation in cloud security will democratize the path to becoming a security expert As cloud security innovation progresses, it will facilitate the journey for individuals to become security professionals. Micr…

We’re looking for endpoint administrators to take our new Exam MD-102: Endpoint Administrator, currently in beta. If you have subject matter expertise in deploying, configuring, protecting, managing, and monitoring devices and client applications in a Microsoft 365 environment, be sure to check it out. On July 1, 2023, we’re renaming the Microsoft 365 Certified: Modern Desktop Administrator Associate certification to Microsoft 365 Certified: Endpoint Administrator Associate. The updated certification name better reflects the focus for professionals in this role, since the term endpoint more accurately characterizes the range of applicable devices used in solutions …

An image of a fishbowl view of a city skyline with a geometric design above the buildings. This blog is a part of a series of discussions with Ross Smith and OpenAI’s ChatGPT about the future of customer support.   Ross Smith: I want to talk about creativity in customer support. Often times a support engineer will face an issue that they have never seen or heard of before. There is no help article in a knowledge base and they will have to figure out new solutions by being creative. How will large language models like you, originate new ideas that have never been thought of before? ChatGPT: Great question! As a large language model, my ability to generate …

Microsoft Stream (on SharePoint) brings video into the flow of your everyday work so you can collaborate, build relationships, learn at your own pace, and catch up on what you missed with Teams meeting recordings. We’re excited to share news about features that will enhance playback, make it easy to find important content within videos, and help you make and share professional videos. Video-first SharePoint pages Today, the SharePoint team announced a broad set of creator updates including, new features to make video content shine better than ever on intranet pages. A newly updated Stream web part will display single and multiple videos on SharePoint pages wit…

Azure Synapse Analytics April Update 2023 Welcome to the April 2023 Azure Synapse Analytics Update! This month, we have a new ARM template to deploy Azure Data Explorer DB with Cosmos DB connection, as well as additional updates in Apache Spark for Synapse, Synapse Data Explorer, and Data Integration. Read on for more details and don’t forget to watch the video! Table of contents Apache Spark for Synapse Delta Lake – Low Shuffle Merge [*] Synapse Data Explorer Ingest data from Azure Events Hub to ADX free tier New ARM template to deploy Azure Data Explorer DB with Cosmos DB connection New look and feel for Query command bar i…

Microsoft Lists is designed to unlock your team’s full potential by reducing the strain and drudgery of keeping everybody organized, on the same page, and moving forward together. Designed with collaboration in mind, Lists enables teams of all sizes to efficiently track what needs to get done, share resources, and organize information of all shapes and sizes. We’re proud to announce a batch of changes coming later this year that make Lists faster and more powerful than ever before. Whether you’re overseeing a 20,000-person organization and want to standardize the way projects are tracked and approved, or you’re one half of a team of 2 working on narrowing down gift…

Organizations are seeing massive growth in their digital estate as they continue their digitization journey. Businesses run on content – proposals, contracts, invoices, designs, plans, training videos, and more. Every work day, customers add over 2 billion new documents to Microsoft 365. Microsoft Syntex brings advanced AI from the Microsoft Cloud to your M365 content, simplifying your everyday business processes at cloud scale. Microsoft 365 security and compliance offerings empower you to manage and govern your every increasing digital estate diligently. For many organizations, content oversharing and governance are real challenges, no matter the size or geographic…

Microsoft OneDrive gives you the freedom of anywhere access and file collaboration paired with peace of mind that comes from world class security and compliance. But today’s fast pace of work and constant task switching demands something more…a quicker and simpler way to access and share your files. OneDrive is stepping up to fill that need. We are excited to announce a new OneDrive experience for work and school that starts with the OneDrive home page and spans file experiences across Microsoft 365. It’s both a visual and functional upgrade designed to help you get to files quickly and keep your content organized in multiple ways, without you having to do any orga…