Microsoft Support & Discussions

Today, organizations across various industries are generating massive amounts of data, and its volume grows exponentially every year. According to Statista, by 2025 the volume of data/information created, captured, copied, and consumed will reach 191 zettabytes, a 186% increase from 91 zettabytes in 2022. Leveraging machine learning-enabled out-of-the-box trainable classifiers can greatly improve the speed, accuracy, and coverage in identifying sensitive data at enterprise scale. At Microsoft, our goal is to provide a built-in, intelligent, unified, and extensible solution to protect sensitive data across your entire digital estate including multi-cloud (hybrid, Mi…

I know it’s February, but it’s our first blog post of the year and we’re still feeling festive so Happy New Year from the SQL Server on Azure VM team!!! As we reflect on the past year and look toward what’s to come in 2023, we thought it would be a great time to call attention to all the innovations in the price-performance area for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines that came out this past year, and to announce we are starting the new year with a bang in the form of an all-new price-performance study from GigaOm! We’ve hit several milestones in our price-performance journey over the past year or so: If you want to look back on any of the past announcement…

The regulatory landscape is constantly changing, and organizations are often challenged to meet the requirements of a multitude of standards and frameworks. Keeping up with often overlapping requirements creates a significant burden for most organizations. Additionally, a substantial increase in hybrid work models means an organization’s data now lives outside of the traditional boundaries, making it harder to mitigate risks. Organizations face the difficult task of maintaining their own house in order while trying to meet an ever-changing list of compliance requirements. According to a 2022 KPMG study, over 60% of respondents stated they experienced increasing losses fro…

Data security risk is dynamic in today's modern workplace with various constantly changing factors, including types of content, people who interact with data, and the activities around the data*, all of which make it more complex to manage. As 83% of organizations have had more than one data breach, the recurrence of data security incidents is rising and has become a critical vulnerability that organizations must prioritize. Meanwhile, a recent Microsoft study shows that 2 in 5 security leaders feel at extreme risk due to cybersecurity staff shortage**. Often, attempting to find the sweet spot between data protection and productivity takes much of the security team's…

Today, working together means working in the cloud where many employees are empowered to collaborate across time zones, devices, platforms, and networks without having to step outside their homes. This flexibility generates more messaging, file sharing, and document uploading and downloading across the digital estate — making it imperative for organizations to adapt their data protection strategies withe the changing landscape. Organizations today face multiple challenges with traditional DLP solutions as these solutions were adapted to support digital transformation rather than being cloud first, where a majority of the work happens today. A recent research [1] found tha…

Back in October, Microsoft introduced Microsoft Teams Premium (Premium) during Ignite, later announced Premium preview as a limited trial for commercial customers in December, and now generally available February 1. These updates likely went under the radar for many security and compliance professionals, as the solution's safeguards are buried within the valuable efficiency and collaboration enhancements. Admittedly there are some interesting meeting and webinar branding features, and I'm personally excited about the new note taking functionality (powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT) to generate tasks and flag moments in the recording where you're mentioned. However, the purpose …

Organizations across the world want to efficiently investigate and remediate data loss prevention incidents across all locations in their digital estate. This blog provides guidance for choosing the best investigation experience suited for your organization when using Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention. Recommended guidance Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) team recommends using the Microsoft 365 Defender experience for DLP alert investigations. You can learn more here: Investigate data loss incidents with Microsoft 365 Defender | Microsoft Docs If you are currently using the Microsoft Purview compliance portal for DLP investigations, we recomme…

Hi, Jonas here! Or as we say in the north of Germany: "Moin Moin!" I’m a Microsoft Senior Cloud Solution Architect – Engineering (or short Sr. CSA-E) and in this article I want to talk about ConfigMgr Collection Evaluation. About a year ago multiple customers asked me to analyze their collection evaluation process. Mostly to see if there is anything we could optimize and to speed up the evaluation process overall. In the past I used CEViewer, some SQL queries and the total evaluation time as my tools to analyze the process. But since CEViewer was and is no longer supported, I was looking for a different approach. While the individual evaluation times an…

How to detect, investigate and prevent blob-hunting Why is it important to understand blob-hunting? 1. Exfiltrating sensitive information from misconfigured resources is one of the top 3 cloud storage services* threats, and threat actors are continuously hunting storage objects because it’s easy, cheap, and there’s much to find. In some cases, they target your storage accounts. 2. Most people think they don’t have misconfigured storage resources. Most people do. Misconfiguration by end-users is a common problem; if you are safe today, there might still be a mistake tomorrow. 3. There are quick and effective ways to harden your s…

You could find here useful Kusto queries to monitor Elastic Database Pool and Azure SQL Databases standalone. CPU Percentage AzureMetrics | where ResourceProvider == "MICROSOFT.SQL" | where TimeGenerated >= ago(1d) | where MetricName in ('cpu_percent') | parse _ResourceId with * "/microsoft.sql/servers/" Resource | summarize CPU_percent = max(Maximum) by Resource, MetricName Data IO percentage. AzureMetrics | where ResourceProvider == "MICROSOFT.SQL" | where TimeGenerated >= ago(1d) | where MetricName in ('physical_data_read_percent') | parse _ResourceId with * "/microsoft.sql/servers/" Resour…

Today, we got a new service request that our customer faced the following error message: Database 'XXX' on server 'xyz.database.windows.net' is not currently available. Please retry the connection later. If the problem persists, contact customer support, and provide them the session tracing ID of '{XXXXX7B5-BFBE-437D-A34D-NNNNNN}'. (.Net SqlClient Data Provider) After checking our internal telemetry data we found all of login failures mentioned are due to Auto-Pause/Resume for Serverless DB tier. This Azure SQL DB is Serverless DB; Serverless is price-performance optimized for single databases with intermittent, unpredictable usage patterns that can afford som…

What’s included: Free self-paced online learning content on Microsoft Learn. Free practice resources for Fundamentals exams. One free Pearson Vue Fundamentals certification exam voucher, per exam, per student. Students can get started at http://aka.ms/StudentCertification Help to get Student skilled and certified in Feb 2023 Microsoft offers AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals and AI-900 AI Fundamentals live training webinars for students in the month of February to help you prepare for the certification exams. These webinars are free and available at varied dates and times with recordings to accommodate participants across global time zones. The sessions ar…

Initially Forms app was launched in Teams - for different experiences based on the sync vs async user scenarios, as it points to polling experience in meetings for quick creation to launch, while it points to survey experience in the context of Teams channel. To provide an intuitive and easy-to-access experience, Polls app was launched - a dedicated app for all your polling and quiz needs in Teams meeting and chat. We are glad to see that hosting an effective and interactive meeting just got easier after the launch of Polls. Why Use Polls? By using Polls, you will enjoy the following benefits: Dedicated Solution: With a dedicated app for polling and quizze…

The MVP Program has a long-term commitment to skilling through technical communities. In this interviews series focusing on skilling initiatives, we will be highlighting MVPs who actively contributes to the Skilling Program. Diana Birkelbach, Germany Tell us a little about yourself. What is your focus as an MVP and what do you do professionally? “I’m a Business Applications MVP working as a Principal Software Architect at the business consulting company ORBIS SE. As I have a long history of developing Microsoft CRM (Dynamics 365) Apps, it was natural to me to move on to Power Apps, with a stronger focus on model-driven apps. I really love the possibi…

Issue Some time when user try to start a new Xevent session gets error msg 25740. ‘Unable to start event session ‘EventSession’ because system is busy. Please try again later.’ Investigation That’s due to the limitation on number of the Xevent session that can be started on the same time in Azure SQL single database or Elastic pool cap on number of started XEvent sessions. There is a cap on number of started XEvent sessions in Azure SQL Database: In a single Azure SQL Database, the limit is 100. In an elastic pool, the limit is 100 database-scoped sessions per pool. In dense elastic pools, starting a new extended event session …

SAP ASE 16.0 on Azure NetApp Files for SAP Workloads on SLES15 Introduction This document will show how you can install SAP NetWeaver 7.5 based on ASE 16.0 and SLES15 SP2 in Azure using Azure NetApp Files (ANF) as storage platform for data and log areas. SAP Installation Documentation: Installation Guide for Linux (sap.com) SAP ASE Home - SAP ASE - Community Wiki 1554717 - SYB: Planning information for SAP on ASE - SAP ONE Support Launchpad 1928533 - SAP Applications on Microsoft Azure: Supported Products and Azure VM types 2015553 - SAP on Microsoft Azure: Support prerequisites 1492000 - General Support Statement for Virtual Environment…

Hello from the Project Team! The January updates for Project for the Web are as follows: New Features Grid Conditional Coloring ~ Create rules on various project fields to visually highlight patterns in the project data. Increased Taks Limit ~ Create up to 1,000 tasks within a single project Upcoming Features Extended Timeline Zoom ~ Get a more complete picture of your long-term project in the Timeline view by using 4 new zoom scale options. Advanced Dependencies ~ Set non-default dependencies between tasks such as Start-to-Start, Finish-to-Finish and Start-to-Finish dependencies. Assigned to Me ~ View and update Project tasks assigned to you …

ChatGPT, es un chatbot lanzado por OpenAI, el cual responde tus preguntas, rechaza solicitudes inapropiadas, etc. El viernes 10 de febrero tendremos una sesión en la cual aprenderás cómo agregar toda esta funcionalidad a tu aplicación de Power Platform. Asimismo, podrás integrar las características de OpenAI GPT en varias demostraciones completas de Power Platform. Puedes registrarte a esta charla haciendo clic aquí. Al aprender sobre Power Platform, Fusion Teams e integraciones en la nube puede proporcionar una variedad de beneficios para los desarrolladores que siguen aprendiendo, algunos de estos son: Avance profesional: Con una creciente demanda …

The security community is constantly growing, changing, and learning from each other in order to better position the world against cyber security threats. For years, Microsoft has driven a customer-obsessed development process by hosting two private communities for end-users of Microsoft security products: the Microsoft Cloud Security Private Community and the Microsoft 365 Defender Customer Connection Program. Under a strict confidentiality framework, our engineering teams get direct community feedback and insights for our roadmap plans, new user experience designs, private preview features, and more. Today, we are happy to announce that these two communit…

Today, we got a service request that our customer got the following error message: Lock request time out period exceeded. (.Net SqlClient Data Provider) using SQL Server Management Studio. Following I would like to share with you some details about this issue and how to find and fix it. The first thing is to run a transaction without adding commit transaction, for example: begin transaction CREATE TABLE IX7 (ID INT) Second, modify the SET LOCK TIMEOUT in SQL Server Management Studio->Tools->Options->Query Execution->SQL Server->Advanced change the SET LOCK TIMEOUT from -1 to 10000 miliseconds. Third, …

Good morning and Happy Friday, everyone! We had a busy week here in the MTC, so let’s jump right on in, shall we? MTC Moments of the Week Our MTC Member of the Week spotlight this week goes to @rrestrivera! Rodrigo has been an active participant in the Excel forum since joining the MTC in November, and we’re happy to have you here helping the community! Diving into February, we had a week packed with community events this week. First up, on Monday, we had our AMA for Microsoft Entra Permissions Management, giving MTC’ers the opportunity to ask questions and voice feedback with the team. Shout out to everyone who joined and, of course, our exper…

Below, you will find a consolidated list of resources that will aid in migrating BizTalk Server workloads to Azure Integration Services. Please bookmark this page for future reference. Architecture Guidance BizTalk Server Migration to Azure Integration Services Architecture Guidance Ask the Experts Part 1: BizTalk Server Migration to Azure Integration Services - Ask the Experts with Stephen W Thomas and Michael Stephenson Part 2: BizTalk Server Migration to Azure Integration Services - Ask the Experts with Sandro Pereira Part 3: BizTalk Server Migration to Azure Integration Services - Ask the Experts with Rik Hepworth & Riccardo Viglianis Part 4…

In times of uncertainty and economic downturn, one of the natural moves of individuals and organizations is cutting down their spending. The main question that arises is how to do more with less. In this article we are going to cover a couple of available options that can help in reducing the costs of your SQL Managed Instance. The list includes, but is not limited to: Azure Dev/Test pricing Start/Stop capability Right sizing resources Adjusting service tier Azure Hybrid Benefit (AHB) Reserved instance pricing (RI) Free license for geo disaster-recovery setup Azure Dev/Test pricing Target: non-production environments Azure Dev/Test pricing gives custo…