Microsoft Support & Discussions

Recently, my team engaged with a customer where they were looking for a better method to extract & expose various marketing-related data feature aggregates for use in training a machine learning model to predict the outcome of customer contacts or touchpoints – to help determine if they would ultimately lead to real sales opportunities. Data feature aggregates are simply summary statistics or calculations performed on a set of data to derive new features or attributes. Feature aggregates are commonly used in machine learning to provide more informative and relevant input data for model training purposes. Machine learning has become an essential tool for…

Have you ever been in a situation where a Windows device takes an update that is not compatible with the system or causes an issue that prevents user productivity? In this scenario, it can be frustrating to determine the best way to get the device(s) back to a protected and productive state. Using Microsoft Intune, here are a few ways to address the situation. If the update you want to uninstall is a Windows feature update that replaced the previous version of the operating system (OS) on the device, you can roll back the feature update using Intune and by leveraging the Update CSP. Screenshot of the Overview page in the Intune admin center, showing the Uninstall op…

Microsoft supports the broadest app, peripheral, and device ecosystem. Whether you're looking to understand how we maintain the 99.7% application compatibility rate or want to confirm it for your organization, this skilling snack is for you! We're excited to introduce our freshly baked blog series to help you throughout your deployment journey: from app inventory to testing to health monitoring. Testing and reporting tools add flavor, along with the visual support of a demo. Time to learn: 109 minutes [attachment=35516:name]READ Introduction: App confidence: From our compatibility story to yours (6 mins) See what's behind the scenes of ou…

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, cyberattacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated and prevalent. Small and medium-sized businesses are particularly vulnerable due to budget constraints and limited specialized security skills. In fact, 43% of all cyberattacks target small businesses, and the consequences can be dire: 60% of businesses close permanently within six months of an attack.1 That's why it's more important than ever for small businesses to modernize their security solutions and move away from traditional antivirus software. Microsoft continues to develop a comprehensive set of security solutions that are easy to use, cost-effective, and sp…

Copying FHIR Entities using fhir-loader In this blog post, we will review an alternative to the built-in FHIR Server $export and $import functionality, fhir-loader. Prerequisites This article, and the corresponding FHIR-loader code assumes that you already have an Azure Health Data Services or the legacy Azure API for FHIR FHIR Server installed and that you will be installing fhir-loader into the same resource group. Doing so will ease the configuration and security of fhir-loader as it will pull relevant keys from the existing KeyVault. FHIR-loader should work against other FHIR servers supporting the HL7 export functionality, but it has not been explicit…

Learn how easy it is to quickly set up some basic alerting and monitoring in your Azure VMware Solution environment. In this video, I utilize the GitHub repository provided by Microsoft AVS experts available at Enterprise Scale for AVS Setting up Alerts for Azure VMware Solution Follow along the AVS Monitoring portion of the Brownfield Deployment. Monitoring is a crucial part of running any resources whether its on-premises or in the cloud. This quick start for Azure gives you the basics to get up and running with Alert Groups that alert once thresholds are met, Service Health that updates with impacting events for AVS, and a Dashboard monitoring: CPU, mem…

As the Microsoft Teams administrator of your organization, one of the operational activities you will be responsible for is developing an adoption strategy to drive the full usage of Microsoft Teams in your organization. While having your users quickly onboarded to Microsoft Teams is necessary, increasing their engagement with what is more than a communication tool is essential. It will help if you've devised a well-thought-through strategy to drive your organization's adoption of Microsoft Teams. Overview of Microsoft Teams Microsoft Teams is the hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365 that brings together people, conversations, and content – along with the …

Remote work and sustainability have changed how we use our physical spaces. As a result, there is a growing need to optimize our facilities to support a hybrid workforce and reduce the environmental impact of where we work. It may seem obvious, but floor plans are vital resources for facilities managers to plan physical space usage. Moving from a static representation to an interactive indoor mapping solution enables building managers to assess available space and equipment, respond to critical issues, and adapt to the demands of hybrid workplaces instantly while reducing their overall carbon footprint. Microsoft has many diverse workspaces worldwide. These are pla…

Introduction One of the most useful debug features of API Management is request tracing. The problem is: we need to reproduce the same client request with an extra header (Ocp-Apim-Trace) or tell the consumers to do so. What if we could just generate the traces from the APIM clients without telling them to add such header or do that ourselves? Is there an easier way to have APIM log the request traces coming from the real consumers temporarily for a certain period without much effort? This article is also available on GitHub. Pre-requisites API Management instance Azure FrontDoor instance or Azure Application Gateway instance Azure FrontDoor or Appli…

As organizations try to cut costs in response to a challenging economic outlook, it’s crucial for them to narrow their investments to those that provide a tangible return. We’ve conducted a handful of studies looking at the business impact of investing in employee experience, specifically with Microsoft Viva. The results provide evidence that the Viva apps are effective in driving better business outcomes. In this blog, we are focusing on one particular aspect of the employee experience: growth. Employee growth encapsulates everything from training and upskilling your workforce to connecting people with the right experts and expertise at your organization. Investme…

Scenario: A company has deployed SAP HANA Scale-Out architecture to run one of their mission-critical business application. As part of the SAP HANA Scale-out, they have a number of HANA worker nodes that need to be load balanced to ensure SAP Application or 3rd party application always connect to Master node using same [Frontend] DB hostname. The below configuration only applies to SAP BW Scale-out N+1 configuration where a pacemaker is not implemented. Overview: SAP HANA is an in-memory database platform that enables real-time analytics and processing of large data volumes. In a scale-out configuration, SAP HANA can be deployed across multiple virtual machin…

The SAP CDC connector, which is part of the Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse solutions, provides you with a simple and efficient way to access information that is most valuable to your organization. With its ability to extract data using a wide range of source objects, the SAP CDC connector makes it easy for businesses to extract and process SAP data making it a valuable source of information for analytics. In many cases, customers want to access data stored directly in the ABAP tables. Traditional data extraction methods, such as extractors or CDS Views, may not always provide the level of specificity required. They provide additional transformation layer to e…

Microsoft SQL Server is one of the most widely used databases on-premises, deployed by many customers as the core of their business-critical applications and services. Azure VMware Solution is the ideal solution for those customers planning to move their workloads to the cloud without major changes and leveraging their investments and existing skills in VMware technologies. Migrating those workloads will also enable the possibility of taking advantage of Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server for their SQL workloads and save significant costs in Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server licenses. The Azure VMware Solution product group has created a series of …

Unit Testing Introduction A unit test usually involves writing code to test a specific function or method, using input data and expected output data. The test code then executes the function or method with the input data, compares the resulting output to the expected output, and reports any discrepancies as errors or failures. This approach allows developers to test each unit of code in isolation, ensuring that their code is modular, well-designed, and functioning as intended. For example, if you have a method that converts a full name to a first name and a last name and the input is John Doe, what you would want to validate is that the output of that m…

I'm sure you've thought about how to update SQL Server containers running on a Kubernetes cluster at some point. So, this blog attempts to answer the question. According to the Kubernetes documentation, there are two Update strategies for statefulset workloads. For your convenience, I'm quoting the summary below: OnDelete update : When a StatefulSet's .spec.updateStrategy.type is set to OnDelete, the StatefulSet controller will not automatically update the Pods in a StatefulSet. Users must manually delete Pods to cause the controller to create new Pods that reflect modifications made to a StatefulSet's .spec.template. Rolling update : When a statefuleset's .spec.upd…

As the demand for intelligent applications continues to grow, developers are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to enhance the functionality of their applications. Chatbots have become one of the most popular ways of delivering conversational AI. ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM) developed by OpenAI, is a powerful tool for building chatbots that can understand natural language and provide intelligent responses. Since its initial release in November 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has incredibly popular worldwide. In this blog post, myself and a colleague, Sandeep Nair, walk through our experience in learning the Large Language…

Are you ready to take your skills to the next level with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning on Azure? If yes, then join us for the Game of Learners Clinics, a 5-week upskill initiative that will teach you how to build and deploy end-to-end AI Solutions on Microsoft Azure. You will learn from experts and mentors who will guide you through hands-on labs and challenges. You will also get the opportunity to prepare for the Azure Artificial Intelligence Fundamental certification, which is free for students, industry-recognized and offered by Microsoft. By the end of the program, you will have the option to take the Exam AI-900: Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals…

If you're running an application on Azure Container App, there may come a time when you need to troubleshoot network issues. One of the best ways to do this is by collecting a network trace. In this blog post, we'll walk you through the process of collecting a network trace on Azure Container App using the `tcpdump` tool. Step 1: Accessing the Azure Container App Console To access the Azure Container App Console, navigate to your container app in the Azure Portal. Once you've selected your container app, click on the "Console" option under the "Monitoring" blade. This will open up a terminal window in your browser that you can use to connect to your container. …

Summary Now in Azure, we can deploy Open AI with chatgpt-35-turbo model as an Azure resource, so this blog introduces how to integrate the Azure Open AI in Teams channel without using a bot. Prerequisite Azure Open AI resource with a deployment which using "chatgpt-35-turbo". Azure Storage Account with a blob container which named "gpt". For Open AI conversion, if we need to enable the multi-turn conversations, we need to provide the whole conversation (channel replies) histories for Open AI API call. But in Logic App, we don't have built-in action for get all the replies of a channel message, so we need to use blob storage to save the conversation histor…

Azure Web Application Firewall provides a comprehensive solution for protecting web applications from various types of application attacks, ensuring high availability and optimal performance. It is critical to configure WAF in such a way as to reduce the likelihood of false positives while still providing sufficient protection against actual threats. False positives occur when a Web Application Firewall (WAF) erroneously detects legitimate web traffic as malicious and subsequently denies access. For instance, an HTTP request that poses no threat may trigger WAF to classify it as an SQL injection attack due to how characters are passed through the request body, thereby …

This is part two of the blog series on RNA sequencing analysis using Nextflow. In the first part we introduced configuration files required to run nf-core/rnaseq pipeline on dedicated virtual machines on Azure. We also presented benchmarking results for two machines series: Ddv4 and Edv4; and discussed possible cost savings due to switching from dedicated to low-cost machines. In this post we describe configuration file change needed to run pipeline on low-cost virtual machines. We used updated configuration to benchmark the pipeline on Edv4-series low-priority machines. The dedicated vs. low-priority comparison shows that the cost to run a pipeline can be reduced …

As the demand for intelligent applications continues to grow, developers are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to enhance the functionality of their applications. Chatbots have become one of the most popular ways of delivering conversational AI. ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM) developed by OpenAI, is a powerful tool for building chatbots that can understand natural language and provide intelligent responses. Since its initial release in November 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has reached over 100 million users worldwide. In this blog post, we will explore a sample released by the Azure Cosmos DB team created by myself and …

This is part two of the blog series on RNA sequencing analysis using Nextflow. In the first part we introduced configuration files required to run nf-core/rnaseq pipeline on dedicated virtual machines on Azure. We also presented benchmarking results for two machines series: Ddv4 and Edv4; and discussed possible cost savings due to switching from dedicated to low-cost machines. In this post we describe configuration file change needed to run pipeline on low-cost virtual machines. We used updated configuration to benchmark the pipeline on Edv4-series low-priority machines. The dedicated vs. low-priority comparison shows that the cost to run a pipeline can be reduced …

We are thrilled to announce that Azure Automanage Machine Best Practices now enables you to apply CIS aligned Azure security baselines through Automanage Machine Configuration. Azure Automanage Machine Best Practices is a consolidated management solution that simplifies daily server management through effortless automation by handling the initial setup and configuration of Azure best practice services. Automanage continuously monitors machines across their entire lifecycle, automatically bringing them back into conformance should they drift from the desired state. And the best part - Automanage machine best practices is generally available and free to use! You only…