Change Analysis GA announcement

[Guest CawaMS]

We are announcing the GA of Azure Monitor change analysis feature. The Change Analysis feature:

 

• Expands the observability of your Azure environment by showing changes in App Services files and configurations, resource properties, and network configuration settings.
  
• Shortens time to troubleshoot an application issue and reduces business loss by allowing you to quickly identify problematic external and internal changes.
  
• Enables DevOps teams to centrally manage resource changes and prevent issues from happening.
  

 

Change Analysis is built on top of scalable and secure data platforms for real time observability. Try it out today at https://aka.ms/changeanalysis/portal.

 

Figure 1: Change Analysis is now available in Azure Monitor portal

 

 

 

 

 

 

Change Analysis brings observability in Cloud

 

 

While metrics, logs, and traces explain what happened, Change Analysis answers why. Identifying what changed can prove difficult as complexity increases with agility in cloud operations, distributed application environment, and team structures. Change Analysis brings completeness and operational efficiency to cloud observability by seamlessly integrating with existing observability tools, such as Diagnose and Solve problems and Activity Log.

 

Change Analysis centrally shows impactful changed resource properties across multiple subscriptions, supporting major resource and Web App in-guest configuration changes. Navigate easily to the changes of interest by applying rich filters. Each change record provides before and after values at one-glance, while the change details page offers further information, such as who made the change.

 

Here is an example of how Change Analysis solves a Web App 403 failure. Such failures are commonly caused by changed Network rules but are difficult to track due to the sophistication in Networking layers and application dependencies. Change Analysis simplifies the troubleshooting by integrating with Web App Diagnose and Solve problems to detect application changes in the timeframe related to the failure. Problematic dependencies resources can complementarily be identified by Navigator and Application Insights distributed tracing. Now Change Analysis can show records (such as a wrong Network rule in the application) and support engineers can troubleshoot the change records causing the failure.

 

Scenarios for applying Change Analysis

 

 

Change Analysis integrates with several existing observability and management tools so investigations can be done within one workflow. Change Analysis creates efficiency for development and DevOps tasks in the following scenarios:

 

• Troubleshoot what changed in an application and its dependencies in the Diagnose and Solve Problems tool
  
• Investigate and confirm that desired changes happened through Change Analysis in Activity Log Change History
  
• Routinely monitor what changed and share with your team using the Change Analysis portal experience
  
• Investigate Metrics spikes by drilling into Change Analysis logs
  
• Correlate Change Analysis with other observability data using Azure Workbooks
  
• Investigate who made a change by clicking into a change to view details
  

Change Analysis is scalable and secure

 

 

Real-time applications require real-time observability. Change Analysis is built on top of the Resource Configuration Changes feature of Azure Resource Graph (ARG). ARG is a core component of Azure platform that powers querying and storing resource configuration snapshots at-scale. While all resource configuration changes are centrally and securely stored, sensitive settings such as a Web App settings change are stored directly in the Web App sandbox and require sufficient user permissions to be viewed. With efficient API and data platform provided by ARG and added security rules, Change Analysis performantly and securely delivers observability into applications hosted in Azure.

 

Cost and performance overhead

 

 

Change Analysis is offered at no additional cost and introduces no performance impact in your Azure environment.

 

Learn more and get started

 

• Change Analysis overview: Use Change Analysis in Azure Monitor
  
• Enable Change Analysis: Enable Change Analysis - Azure Monitor | Microsoft Docs
  
• Navigating to a change: Navigate to a change using custom filters in Change Analysis
  
• Pin changes to Azure dashboard: Pin and share a Change Analysis query to the Azure dashboard
  
• Share your feedback: Via send Feedback option within Change Analysis homepage
  

 

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