Microsoft Support & Discussions

Heya folks, Ned here again. I just published a survey for IT Pros on Group Policy Preferences Drive Map. It's just a few minutes of your time, totally anonymous (unless you want to talk more) and could help make your life easier someday. Your feedback is invaluable for prioritizing our work, we really welcome your experience. >> Take survey << Group Policy Preferences (aka "GPP") and its Drive Map option are features included in Active Directory. Drive Map is a replacement for logon scripts that automatically connect SMB drives using NET USE or New-SmbMapping. For more information, review Drive Map. If you are not using SMB ma…

Today, we are excited to announce the capability to run Apache Airflow DAGs (Directed Acyclic Graph) within Azure Data Factory, adding a key Open-Source integration that provides extensibility for orchestrating python-based workflows at scale on Azure. Azure Data Factory Managed Airflow provides a managed orchestration service for Apache Airflow that simplifies the creation and management of Airflow environments. In addition, it natively integrates Apache Airflow with Azure Active Directory for a single sign-on (SSO) and a more secure solution (instead of requiring basic auth for logins). What is Apache Airflow? Apache Airflow is an open-so…

Authored by: Shuichi Gojuki, Cloud Solution Architect, Aimee Garcia, PM AI Benchmarking, Jon Shelley, Principal TPM Manager Ansys LS-DYNA enables users to simulate complex real-world problems. LS-DYNA is an industry leader in explicit simulation software that is used in industries such as automotive, aerospace, bioengineering, military, and construction. It has the capability to accurately predict automotive collision behavior which includes the impacts collisions have on occupants. These real-world simulations allow automotive companies to significantly reduce the number of experimental design car prototypes, which in turn reduces time and expenses. The Az…

With Universal Print's easy-to-read graphical data, you can quickly learn what you need to know about print activity in your tenant. Organizations need immediate reporting that keeps usage, cost, and infrastructure health front and center when managing print deployments as Universal Print deployments grow. Fortunately, the Usage and Reports dashboard now has five new data points, graphs, and charts with the option to view data from the previous day, week, or month. A screenshot of the Usage and Reports page's charts, graphs, and data points Your organization's print consumption is tracked over time using resource and activity counts. Here's what's new: Totals…

The past couple of years have demonstrated that the future of work is fluid, dynamic, and cloud-powered—and that future is now here. Whether you’re a tech professional tuning your skills or you’re part of an organization that relies on those skills, you know that staying ahead of the curve in this rapidly changing environment requires proactivity and adaptability. Microsoft Learn helps you build skills that open doors, so you can get the most value from Microsoft products and services. Because your career or the success of your organization depends on keeping skills current and relevant to the work you do, we regularly review and update our portfolio of training an…

Introduction Did you ever find yourself in the situation where getting alerted to something happening inside your CosmosDB database would be useful? I'm talking about using raw SQL queries. For example, you would like to get an Azure Monitor alert if a query like "SELECT * FROM orders WHERE orders. status = 'failed' " returns anything. Optimally you would want the original application/service responsible for this domain to raise such an event and perform an action on it. But what if you can't do that or want an alert before the app code gets fixed? With Azure Monitor Alerts we have a very powerful tool to handle any type of alert incidents and taking ac…

Today, we worked on a service request that our customer got the following two error messages: The file name 'XTP' is reserved for the files containing In-Memory OLTP data or The filegroup name 'XTP' is reserved for the filegroup containing In-Memory OLTP data restoring a backup from OnPremises to Azure SQL Managed Instance. URL: T-SQL differences between SQL Server & Azure SQL Managed Instance - Azure SQL Managed Instance | Microsoft Learn For the error: Msg 41927, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 - The file name 'XTP' is reserved for the files containing In-Memory OLTP data. This above error means that we have a file in our Logical Names that is called XTP a…

There are many Community Managers inside Microsoft who would love to hear your feedback about the way we support our communities. Now is your chance to share your ideas and priorities with us by taking just a few minutes to fill out our Community Insights Survey. This survey is anonymous and open to all community members regardless of how long you've been participating or your area of expertise. It is open until February 15, 2023. After we have compiled your insights, we will be sharing them back with the community during of our monthly General Sessions for our Microsoft Global Community Initiative (https://aka.ms/MGCI). If you want to be in the know, sign up …

As economic conditions continue to be uncertain and hybrid poses a unique challenge to keep people connected, organizations everywhere are asking the question “How can we do more with less?” and are looking to optimize and consolidate for cost savings and efficiencies while accelerating growth – and the virtual events space has been no exception. Now more than ever, event hosts and organizers are looking for an end-to-end platform that’s familiar to use, provides a secure and reliable experience, and enables customization and management for all aspects of before, during, and after when delivering virtual events. Today, we’re excited to share how we’ve evolving the we…

I am not going to lie. I was tempted to use OpenAI's ChatGPT to write this blog post. In fact, I went as far as asking ChatGPT why a company would choose Microsoft for their Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) and the answer was awesome! But while it did a great job, it felt canned. Anyone who knew me would read this blog and know it wasn't written by me. In fact, even those who didn't know me would read this blog and feel zero human connection. They would just get information. That brings me to my point: The value of human connection. When we started out building APIs in Azure Communication Services for adding video, voice, chat, text messaging, and email…

On February 8th of 2021 we launched a program with our partners Data Dynamics and Komprise to help address the complexity of migrating multi-terabyte file shares, exports, and object stores to Azure Blob Storage, Azure Files, and Azure NetApp Files. As we approach the anniversary, it is time to address how the experience has been to date, the most common questions we have received, and what the future holds. Looking back We launched this program because we heard from customers that they needed help automating, simplifying, and accelerating the migration of large file and object stores to Azure. The response has been overwhelmingly positive and validated the …

Introduction With every company, across every industry, digitally transforming, tons of modern applications are built at an unprecedented pace and speed, and all rely on the underlying network infrastructure. Networking enables application components to communicate with each other, its dependencies, other applications (usually through APIs) and its consumers. To gain abstraction and velocity, more and more organizations are moving from traditional datacentre networks into cloud networks, adopting a wide variety of cloud networking services. NetDevOps comes to the rescue, as an agile approach to help you accelerate your Azure networking deployments and operations.…

According to official documentation: Deploy single-tenant Standard logic apps to private storage accounts using private endpoints - Deploy Standard logic apps to private storage accounts - Azure Logic Apps Quote: "This deployment method requires that temporary public access to your storage account. If you can't enable public access due to your organization's policies, you can still deploy your logic app to a private storage account. " The description from above essentially means that the Deployment method available at Azure portal requires its selection of back-end storage account to be accessible from public network, or otherwise the deployment …

This blog is about introducing some growth changes for Service Bus SDK for python and several common exception scenarios as well as troubleshooting suggestions. With more and more developers taking Python as the language of developing Azure Service Bus for their application, it is necessary to have a clear awareness about the different versions change and current version. The attractiveness and painfulness of coding is deal with the exceptions and enjoy the sense of achievement. Here we would like to have an introduction about the different versions of Python for Service Bus and common exceptions and its sample scenarios to help us understand its mean…

Every year, organizations like Microsoft invest massively in empowering students as this prepares the next generation to take over the world. Microsoft's mission is to 'empower everyone including students with access to the right tools and opportunities'. But why is Microsoft willing to invest in you? At Microsoft we want to invest in as many people as possible because we strongly believe that everyone can build amazing solutions when guided and provided with the right tools and resources. Students are the future; it is important therefore that we help them get this right early enough so they don’t have to spend years doing the wrong things and realizing later the…

Today, we had a new service request where our customer receives the following error when they try to run a created job in SQL Managed Instance: Cannot start the job 'XXX' (ID XXXXX-XXXX-XXX-XXXX-XXX) because it does not have any job server or servers defined. Associate the job with a job server by calling sp_add_jobserver. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 14256) After checking the error ( 14256 ) it is verified that the job has not been mapped in the managed instance server when it was created, so following the guidelines to do it manually using 'sp_add_jobserver' stored procedure and after executing the code below, job worked correctly. USE msdb ; GO EXE…

In this video, our colleague Kenny Yu is going to show us how to configure Azure SQL Managed Link. Continue reading...

Happy New Year everyone! 2023 has arrived and it's time for our first monthly update on the latest and greatest in the world of ADX Web UI. Continue reading to learn more about: Amazon S3 support in Ingestion Hub Data source parameters (Dashboards) Plotly visuals support KQL IntelliSense improvements View cluster history Amazon S3 support in Ingestion Hub Now you can Ingest data from Amazon S3 seamless via the Ingestion Hub in KWE. The Ingestion flow can be completed with following selection: Source type: Amazon S3 Link to Source: Enter the connection string of a bucket / object. Learn more Please use the following S3 url format: h…

Hello everyone, I'm so excited to share our first release of 2023! This release is jam-packed with new pre-checks before install, improvements to Windows Admin Center flows, and we published a ton of great documentation over the winter holiday. In case you were wondering about the release name, we're moving to year-month-day release names to align with AKS in Azure more closely. Before getting into the update details, we have a few Announcements: If you shut down your AKS clusters over the holiday or skipped the November update, you may have internal certificates that expired. Follow these steps to recover your AKS cluster from expired certificates. W…

Sometimes we need to get iteration index in Foreach loop for data processing, one resolution is to set the "Concurrency Control" to 1 and use a variable as index which always be added by 1 for each iteration. This approach can achieve what we would like to have, but it will impact the performance since the foreach is in sequential mode. In order to keep the "Foreach" action running in parallel, there's a new approach as following: Steps 1. Generate a new array which save the all the index of the original array which need to be processed. For example, if we have a 10 items array, then the index array need to be generated as [ 0, 1, 2 ... 9 ] (start fro…

Do You Have the Last Line of Defense Against Ransomware? When it comes to protecting our organization assets against threats, ransomware remains at the top of everyone’s mind. More than 2/3rd of businesses have faced some sort of outage in the last three years. For a large enterprise, every outage costs more than $100,000. That quickly adds up to a significant expense and loss of revenue for any organization. When we look at numbers like this, it makes it much simpler to create a business justification for preparing for ransomware. At this point, ransomware has made it to the mainstream news on many occasions, and it’s a term that IT practitio…

Throughout the Azure HPC panorama, Azure CycleCloud is the tool of choice where HPC workloads requiring a scheduler like OpenPBS, Slurm or IBM LSF are migrated on Azure in a full cloud or in a hybrid scenario. The role of Azure CycleCloud is to act as a deployment tool and an orchestrator for HPC clusters with a specific scheduler. As of today, among the multiple schedulers for which there are active templates and projects Altair® PBS Professional® is still lacking an integration on Microsoft Azure GitHub This article is aimed at presenting the development of an integration for Altair® PBS Professional® built on top of the Azure CycleCloud PBS Pro project an…

Introduction This Blog details how to comprehensively monitor and effectively troubleshoot Change Data Capture (CDC) using extended events. CDC Performance can be monitored using the following two CDC extended events that were introduced in SQL Server 2022.: repl_logscan_session cdc_cleanup_job_status These extended events were added to aid in troubleshooting and enable alerting while CDC jobs are running. These debug events provide the customer with a way to prove CDC configuration throughput and expose any errors encountered. What is Change Data Capture? Change Data Capture (CDC) is currently available in SQL Server (all supported versions…

As mentioned in previous posts, I’m fortunate to meet with many healthcare customers, and a use case that has come up quite a bit recently is solutions that help connect the right people together, when one of them may be “remote” and lack access to their regular applications. Some of these include: Mobile nurse requesting assistance from a physician (Nurse is external to network resources) EMT requesting ED physician (ET3 scenario) Physician to physician consult “nudge” (orders are in the EMR, requesting a live call) The Microsoft cloud supports the full spectrum of solutions ranging from lightweight to very advanced. In this post we’ll focus primarily on getti…

Top tips to optimize cost savings using free tools and plans as you run workloads in Azure. Identify unnecessary spend in Azure Advisor through cost cutting, take advantage of new commitment-based savings plans based on expected utilization, employ cost avoidance tactics, such as setting budgets and monitoring with Microsoft Cost Management, and contain spend through new automation options. Matt McSpirit, Azure expert, shares quick ways to save money for existing Azure customers. Cut unnecessary spend. Identify underutilized resources & implement commitment-based savings plans. Understand, monitor, and forecast cloud costs. …