Quick tip: Get-AzSubscription and Azure Cloud Shell

The Get-AzSubscription PowerShell cmdlet gets the subscription ID, subscription name and home tenant for subscriptions that the current account can access. You can also pass this values in as a parameter e.g. "Get-AzSubscription -SubscriptionId" to find the name of a subscription. 

The easiest way to execute this cmdlet (without having to install anything on your machine) is by using Azure Cloud Shell.  A handy feature of Azure Cloud Shell is predictive intellisense - use the RightArrow key to accept an inline suggestion.

Classic Azure Application Insights deprecated on February 29th 2024 - 7 days to go

 If you missed it - classic Azure Application Insights will be deprecated on February 29th 2024. If you missed the different notification e-mails, you can quite easily see the warning if you navigate to an Azure Application Insights resource in Azure Portal.

Migration is actually quite easy - you just click on the link provided and this will open up the menu depicted below which allows you to associate your Azure Application Insights resource to a Log Analytics Workspace. The good news is that there are no pricing changes when moving to the workspace-based model. 

As indicated in the migration window, this is  a one way operation so plan for it in advance - the points below might impact on how you will do the migration:

• You can link different Application Insight resources to a single Log Analytics workspace or you can make the split - in most case you want to consolidate it.
• Instrumentation keys do not change during the migration so you don't need to worry about this
• The export feature is not available on the Application Insights workspace-based resources - you need to look at diagnostic settings for exporting telemetry
• There might be some schema changes - important to consider when doing KQL queries - check out query data across Log Analytics workspaces, applications and resources in Azure Monitor
• Existing log data will not immediately move to the Log Analytics workspace - only new logs generated after the migration will be stored in the new log location.

Notes on deploying and troubleshooting a Streamlit app on Azure App Services

 A couple of weeks ago I was playing around with Streamlit and decided to deploy it on Azure a
using Azure App Services using the guidance from Deploying Streamlit Applications with Azure App Services . 

Streamlit is an open-source Python library that allows you to create interactive, data-driven web applications in just a few lines of Python code. It does not require you to have any JavaScript, html or CSS experience.  

The deployment using the steps outlined in the blog post went quite smooth but when I navigated to the website, I was greeted by an exception.

Since I haven't worked with Linux for over 20 years now, I feared to be in for a long and painful experience to get this resolved but it actually turned out to be easier then expected. 

First step, I took was looking at the Application Logs for the Azure Web App. Go to the Azure App Service > Diagnose and solve problems > Application Logs. 

When scrolling through the Application Logs

The exception log "TypeError: Descriptor cannot be created directly. Your  generated code is 

out of data and must be regenerated with protoc > 3.19.0. If you cannot immediately

regenerate your protos, some other possible workarounds are: 1. Downgrade the protobuf package to 3.20.x or lower" actually pointed me to a thread on the Streamlit forums - Issue with Protocol Buffers. After changing requirements.txt  to deploy a newer version of Streamlit (see Configure a Linux Python App for Azure App Service for more details on how the Azure App Service deployment engine automatically runs pip install.) all started working correctly again.

References:

• Viewing Azure App Service web server and application logs in real time on Azure Portal
• 30 days of Streamlit challenge
• Streamlit vs Dash vs Shiny vs Voila vs Flask vs Jupyter - comparing data dashboarding tools and frameworks
• Turn an Excel Sheet into an interactive dashboard using Python (Streamlit) -YouTube
• Streamlit app showcasing Plotly graphs
• Stuck learning Python? Make it fun with Streamlit!

Quick tip: finding the Azure data center for your Dynamics 365/CRM online environment

Dynamics 365 (CRM) is being hosted in a number of different Azure datacenters - on Administer Power Platform  - Data center regions you will see an overview of the different regions. If your region is EUR (so url is crm4.dynamics.com), then the linked Azure datacenters can be in Amsterdam (West Europe) or Dublin (North Europe). There is a interesting visualization available on Azure Global Infrastructure

If you need to know whether a CRM instance is hosted in Amsterdam or Dublin (for example when you are setting up Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse), you can simply ping the url of your CRM instance (it will time-out but that is no problem) - if the response url starts with ams it is hosted in Amsterdam, if it is hosted in Dublin, the response will start with dub.

If you want to change the primary datacenter from North Europe (Dublin) to West Europe (Amsterdam)  or vice versa, you can open a Microsoft support ticket. This seems to be a quite common operation and the support request is usually treated quite quickly.

What can you do with the Azure Cosmos DB free tier?

Beginning of March 2020, Microsoft announced the availability of a free tier of Azure Cosmos DB (see Azure Cosmos DB Free Tier is now available)

"When free tier is enabled on an Azure Cosmos DB account, you’ll get the first 400 RU/s and 5 GB of storage for free for the lifetime of the account. Additionally, when using shared throughput databases, you can create up to 25 containers that share 400 RU/s at the database level. There’s a maximum of one free tier account per Azure subscription and you must opt-in when creating the account."

But maybe you are wondering what you can actually do with 400 RU/s? Request Units per second (RU/s) represent the "cost" of a request in terms of CPU, memory and IO. In Azure Cosmos DB you can provision "performance" upfront by setting RU/s at database level, collection level or both. It is however also possible to create Azure Cosmos DB containers and databases in autoscale mode  Containers and databases configured in auto scale mode will automatically and instantly scale the provisioned throughput based on your application needs without impacting the availability, latency, throughput, or performance of the workload globally

I can highly recommend you to take a look at the Microsoft Ignite 2019 session - A developer's guide to Azure Cosmos DB, from onboarding to going live in production . The code samples from session are available on Github - https://github.com/deborahc/cosmos-perf-tips

References:

• Choosing the right partition key for cost and performance with Azure Cosmos DB (Youtube 00:14:27)
• Find the  request unit (RU) charge in Azure Cosmos DB
• April 2020 query updates in Azure Cosmos DB
• Free Tier Cosmos DB ARM template
• Raven DB vs Cosmos DB - article is a little outdated due to a number of new updates to Cosmos DB but still quite interesting

Microsoft cloud IT architecture resources available

Summary: Learn core cloud architecture concepts for Microsoft identity, security, networking, and hybrid. Review prescriptive recommendations for protecting files, identities, and devices when using Microsoft's cloud. Learn how to deploy a modern and secure desktop with Windows 10 and Office ProPlus.

These architecture tools and posters give you information about Microsoft cloud services, including Office 365, Windows 10, Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and hybrid on-premises and cloud solutions. IT decision makers and architects can use these resources to determine the ideal solutions for their workloads and to make decisions about core infrastructure components such as identity and security.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/enterprise/microsoft-cloud-it-architecture-resources

Dynamics 365 Organization Insights revamped - welcome Common Data Service App Analytics

I’m a big fan Dynamics 365 Organization Insights and I have been using for more than a year now  since it was released in February 2017.   Organization Insights provides a number of key statistics about the usage, activity and quality of service (failing API calls, plugin execution failures, etc…) for your Dynamics 365 (online) instance.  A couple of weeks ago Microsoft moved the Organization Insights functionality to the new Power Platform Admin Center . You will find the Organization Insights dashboards by selecting Analytics in the left navigation bar and selecting Common Data Service for Apps.  The analytics for Common Data Service for Apps provides more detailed information and also allows you to filter and download the information in CSV format. The filter functionality allows you to select the specific instance for which you want to see information as well as see define a time frame for which you want to see information.

Please remember that the new Power Platform Admin Center is currently still in preview, so you might stumble upon some quirks but overall I like it a lot. For more information read the Microsoft documentation at Use the Organization Insights Solution to view metrics about your instance