Microsoft Support & Discussions

Today, I worked on a service request that our customer got the following error message: Cannot open server 'servername' requested by the login. Client with IP address 'XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX' is not allowed to access the server. To enable access, use the Windows Azure Management Portal or run sp_set_firewall_rule on the master database to create a firewall rule for this IP address or address range. It may take up to five minutes for this change to take effect. Sometimes, depending on how the cache works or when the update about the firewall rules have been done, it is important to run the command DBCC FLUSHAUTHCACHE to empties the database authentication cache containing …

Meet Phiwayinkosi Khanye Dludlu Introduction Hi, I am Phiwayinkosi Khanya Dludlu , a student at the Durban University of Technology doing a Bachelor's in Information and Communications Technology. I am an aspiring Power Apps Developer, using Power Apps to solve problems and automate business processes. Late last year I was part of a Power Platform Bootcamp hosted by Greenlight Solutions in partnership with the Durban University of Technology and Someleze Diko, a Microsoft Cloud Advocate. As part of the Bootcamp, we were all required to create solutions for different scenarios. I was assigned to create a training request solution. The scenarios is as follows…

Welcome to 2023 Let's start with a warm welcome to 2023. This is the year to grow your career in Tech from Zero to Hero. I want you to stay really close to this Tech Blog this year and we have a lot planned to help you grow and realize your tech career dream. Starting a tech career can be a very daunting task, especially if you're not sure where to begin. Since the tech industry is constantly evolving, it is now much more difficult to keep up with the latest trends and technologies. But with the right knowledge and skills, you can land a rewarding and lucrative career in tech. Here's what you need to know to get started. Identify and Chose a Tech Car…

This article centralizes Azure FinOps (Financial Operations) information and tools to enabling a better understanding and optimization of cloud costs. The main purposes of this guide is to help customers do more with less by: Identifying cost-saving opportunities Optimizing cloud efficiency Gaining a better understanding and control of cloud costs Contribution to this guide The community is encouraged to contribute to this guide! For any content suggestion please visit this GitHub Repository. Table Of Contents What is FinOps? Overview Tools Ways to Optimize Assessment Learning Content General Calculators Cost Management Ad…

Observability using ADX The customers are looking for cost effective tools for enterprise monitoring initiatives of their tech infrastructure. Wanted to share my successful experience of customer scenarios where ADX is the critical component for building a scalable ‘Observability Monitoring solution’. It is a fully managed data service for streaming rapidly changing data and converting it into real-time insights. This can be accomplished with deeper analysis into the behaviors of the Network, Application, Services, Databases, or any technical instances that generate logs. The goal is to design a comprehensive operational monitoring with proactive controls. 3 Pillar…

An Instance-Level Public IP Address (PIP) unlike the Virtual IP Address (VIP) is not load balanced. While the virtual ip is assigned to the cloud service and shared by all virtual machines and role instances in it, the public ip is associated only with a single instance’s NIC. The public ip is particularly useful in multi-instance deployments where each instance can be reachable independently from the Internet. The picture below illustrates the value of PIP and differentiates it from the VIP. The blog will help you understand how to configure the instance level public ip. For some background knowledge, please find the reference Instance-Level Public IP …

Hi folks! My name is Felipe Binotto, Cloud Solution Architect, based in Australia. If you missed, a new pricing plan has been announced for Microsoft Defender for Storage. The legacy pricing plan (per-transaction) is priced at $0.02 per 10K transactions, which can become a bit expensive if the Storage Account has a very large number of transactions. The new pricing plan (per-storage-account) is priced at $10 per storage account which includes 73M transactions. Storage Accounts exceeding 73M transactions will be charged $0.1492 per 1M transactions. We have made available a workbook which can scan all your storage accounts and provide the…

Today, I worked on a service request that your customer is facing the following error message: During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred: Traceback (most recent call last): File "src/pymssql/_pymssql.pyx", line 653, in pymssql._pymssql.connect pymssql._pymssql.OperationalError: (20009, b'DB-Lib error message 20009, severity 9:\nUnable to connect: Adaptive Server is unavailable or does not exist (servername.database.windows.net)\nNet-Lib error during Connection timed out (110)\nDB-Lib error message 20009, severity 9:\nUnable to connect: Adaptive Server is unavailable or does not exist (servername.database.windows.net)\nNet-Lib error during Connecti…

Summary The problem in this case was, somehow, being caused by the customer's App Service having the .NET Core 3.1 runtime installed via Site Extension, instead of using the built-in runtime that comes with App Services. The issue resolved when the Site Extension was removed, and the App Service was stopped and re-started. Deeper Dive into the Data This issue showed different symptoms depending on whether the ASP.NET Core app was running in-process or out-of-process. In-Process In-process, the symptom was a 500.30 In-Process Start Failure with error code 8007023e. This exception code means "unhandled exception." Viewing the eventlog.xml i…

Hi everyone, and Happy New Year! I hope 2023 is treating you well so far. I want to welcome all our new contributors and returning members to the MTC - we have an exciting year ahead! Let’s see what’s been going on in the MTC this week! MTC Moments of the Week Kicking the year off with our first 2023 MTC Member of the Week, we’d like to shoutout @Robert Young for his assistance in the Security, Compliance, and Identity community. Keep up the awesome work! :) And over on the blogs this week, @SakshiB is sharing ways you can start 2023 off right by using Microsoft Viva Insights to build better work habits that improve you and your team’s producti…

IOPs is Overrated, yeah, I said it. How many compute, storage area networks, hard drive vendors and storage services have posted their IOPs capabilities in marketing and didn’t include the throughput (MPBs)? Why when someone sends me IOPs for an Oracle database do I thank them kindly and ask for throughput? Thank you for asking… IO requests for Oracle can be exceptionally efficient depending on the type of workload. In this blog post, I’m going to take three, real examples of Oracle workloads and show how different the ratio is between IOPs and MBPs using the AWR report. Now there is a significant difference from what we produce for sizing and a raw A…

If you run workloads in Azure you’ve no doubt come across Accelerated Networking. Accelerated Networking greatly improves network performance by lowering latency, jitter, and host CPU consumption. To leverage these benefits, Accelerated Networking is enabling SR-IOV for your virtual machine network traffic. The networking team for Azure Stack HCI is interested to hear from you, our customers, to see if you’re deploying Accelerated Networking. Please fill out this short survey to get us your feedback! Thank you for your participation! Basel Kablawi Continue reading...

Do you need to document the policies that are configured for the users in your organization for compliance or other needs? The Cloud Policy service for Microsoft 365 just added a new feature that allows you to export your policy configurations to CSV format. Simply select the policy configuration, click Export, and your browser will prompt you to Open or Save the CSV file. When you open the CSV, you will notice there are two sections. The first section includes general information about the policy configuration, including: Name Description Priority Scope Groups Last modified Last modified by The second section includes detailed informat…

Hi everyone! Brandon Wilson here once again with this month’s “Check This Out!” (CTO!) guide. These posts are only intended to be your guide, to lead you to some content of interest, and are just a way we are trying to help our readers a bit more, whether that is learning, troubleshooting, or just finding new content sources! We will give you a bit of a taste of the blog content itself, provide you a way to get to the source content directly, and help to introduce you to some other blogs you may not be aware of that you might find helpful. If you have been a long-time reader, then you will find this series to be very similar to our prior series “Infrastructure + Securi…

Back in 2020, the need was great to limit exposure to COVID patients because of our limited knowledge of the virus, the lack of PPE and vaccines but these patients still needed care, so a solution was urgent. Which is how our original Virtual Rounding app was created. It was great and met the needs in 2020. See the original post for an overview and sample code for the solution here. Fast forward to 2023 and we have deployed this app or a version of this app to dozens of Providers across the country. As we work on each implementation, we learn new things and have learned how the solution can better meet the needs in 2023. As the crisis has settled many new mo…

Happy New Year from the Project team! With the holiday season coming to a close, the January update will return to the normal rhythm. The December updates for Project for the Web are as follows: 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. 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 in a single project. Advanced Dependencies ~ Set non-default dependencies between tasks such as Start-to-Start, Finish-to-Finish and Start-to-Finish…

Firstly wish you all a very happy new year. I sincerely hope that this year brings you much success. As I was doing a perspective of last year of the value that we added for Azure Functions customers - although we shipped 100’s of small improvements - I wanted to share with all of you a recap of all the major releases and provide a sneak peek on what we are working on in this year. Language Versions Support: This year we continued on making sure that our customers have access to the latest language versions for various languages as soon as we can. We believe we have the most comprehensive latest support across all the major languages among all the major cloud serve…

One month after one of the largest cyber-attacks and exposure of electronic Personal Health Information (ePHI) in 2022, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia released a paper detailing researched cybersecurity issues across the health industry and proposed policy options to mitigate them. The paper, entitled Cybersecurity is Patient Security, covers several gaps in current public and private sector efforts and goes as far to pose the question: what incentives or penalties should be enacted for compliance or non-compliance with federal regulations? A similar cybersecurity assessment and penalization policy to what Senator Warner is alluding to is slated to go in effect in 2023 f…

Greetings to our lovely NTA non-profits. Welcome to part 2 of our Microsoft Teams Meetings series. This article will help you uncover some more cool features within Microsoft Teams that can help take your meetings to the next level. Presenter Modes Microsoft Teams gives you the option to choose from four different presenter modes while you are screen sharing. You can pick from the following modes: content only, side-by-side, standout, and reporter mode. If you prefer not to be seen on the screen during presentation, content only mode allows you to show only what you are presenting. Side-by-side will show your presentation in one square while you are place…

Azure Host OS – Cloud Host One Windows Windows is a versatile and flexible operating system, running on a variety of machine architectures and available in multiple SKUs. It currently supports x86, x64, and ARM architectures. It even used to support Itanium, PowerPC, Alpha, and MIPS (wiki entry). Windows also runs in a multitude of environments; from data centers, laptops, and phones to embedded devices such as ATM machines. Even with all of this support, the core of Windows remains virtually unchanged on all these architectures and SKUs. Windows dynamically scales up, depending on the architecture and the processor that it’s run on to exploit the full…

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a multi-platform cloud-based endpoint protection product that comprises multiple capabilities and features. There are many moving parts that make up Defender for Endpoint, and many of these parts require network connectivity. Disconnected and air-gapped environments can pose a challenge to deploying and configuring Defender for Endpoint. When proxies are added into the mix, interesting things can happen. Recipe for a successful deployment To deploy Defender for Endpoint in a disconnected or air-gapped environment, you’ll need to keep in mind the following items: Involve the correct parties. You’ll need representa…

New Years’ Resolutions: Work out 3-5 days a week. Spend more time with family. Deploy Microsoft 365 services to make my company more efficient and secure. We can’t help you with the first two, but we can help you deploy Microsoft 365 services to improve your company’s efficiency and security with the new Core onboarding advanced deployment guides. Learn how:   Did you know that thousands of customers use the Core onboarding advanced deployment guides each month? The Microsoft 365 Admin Center features Core advanced deployment guides that simplify moving from On-Premises IT to the Cloud. IT Pros can use our core onboarding …

The 2023 Imagine Cup is all about global student innovators building together to make a difference with technology and developing their own skills along the way. Teams had the option of submitting their project to the Epic Challenge as an early step in their competition journey. The Epic Challenge is an opportunity for teams to receive preliminary feedback on their ideas from professional judges and have the chance to win a spot to directly advance to the World Finals round. To enter the challenge, teams submitted a 3-minute project pitch and proposal for an original technology solution developed in one of the 2023 Imagine Cup’s competition categories: Earth, Educ…

This blog will walk through the details on how to enable custom DNS (Domain Name System) entries on an Azure Synapse dedicated pool inside an Azure Synapse workspace in case of disaster recovery. The DNS alias provides a translation layer that can redirect your client programs to different servers. This layer spares you the difficulties of having to find and edit all the clients and their connection strings (in disaster recovery implementation). This is not supported out-of-box, so we need to take extra steps to enable this feature. There are some limitations, so please read these steps carefully. Background Custom DNS (Domain Name System) is supported …

With over 13 million monthly downloads, MLflow has become the standard platform for end-to-end MLOps, enabling teams of all sizes to track, share, package and deploy any model for batch or real-time inference. MLflow has recently released its new version, MLflow 2.0, which incorporates a refresh of the core platform APIs based on extensive feedback from MLflow users and customers, which simplifies the platform experience for data science and MLOps workflows. Being one of the MLflow contributors, Azure Machine Learning made its workspaces MLflow-compatible, which means you can use Azure Machine Learning workspaces in the same way that you use an MLflow tracking serv…