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Azure scalesets - a useful technique?
This post is describing how to take an existing VMSS running instance and then using that as a baseline to create a new base image for all other instances going forward. Now ordinarily you would think...
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When the cloud dies - getting into your windows VM
Now the cloud never fails right....?Well just assume for a minute that's it's not this magical thing that never breaks and is fallible, and then take in one step further and imagine some kind of really...
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Adventures in dns - conditional forwarding reverse dns requests
Well that title is a bit of a mouthful but what i actually want to do is quite simple - take the case in the screenshot below - i can quite happily do the forward lookup (i.e. resolve a name to an ip...
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KQL is my new SQL
As i continue on my cloud journey i find the odd occasion where something i'm working with throws me right back to my days as a DBA working with Oracle (other relational database are...
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Getting a grip on what is done in Azure
Tim (you know who you are) has kicked me back into life to start writing some stuff up again. The volume of work of late has just been so much that i had no inclination to write, maybe this new year...
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Getting an excel list of all Azure Virtual machines
Now i don't think i'm unique in getting frustrated that from some of the Azure portal screens there is no download as csv option or a more effective filter to show exactly what i want.A prime example...
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Zone redundant linux cluster in Azure
So I'm back to clustering again - as mentioned in previous blogs I've done this a lot on the past with HPUX/AIX/redhat/windows/oracle in various different forms but never with SLES and never with Linux...
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Squid meets log analytics
We've a simple squid forward proxy in our environment and we wanted to be able to do some analysis on the logfiles from it. There are lots of ways we could do this but we wanted to be able to leverage...
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Application proxy with AADDS and kerberos delegation
I know what you're thinking - this is the worst name for a blog post ever...... (or possibly what has that picture got to do with any of this).This post is describing what the new kerberos constrained...
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A bit of powershell and Azure magic
 After a long hiatus where volume of work has juts left me with no desire to spend extra effort writing things up on here I've finally put pen to paper (well technically hands to keyboard).There have...
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Serverless CMDB extract from Azure
With a now large and well established Azure estate we have the need to effectively report on what we 'have' in Azure. Now we're a few years in we already have to start thinking about dealing with os...
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Some Azure Resource Graph examples for SQL Server
I've been using resource graph a lot recently and found it hard to find good examples for some of the more fiddly types of queries - primarily where I want to join different sets of data - or...
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The Azure Beehive
 This is a short post about my new favourite feature in the Azure portal - Workbooks. These allow you to create some nice interactive visuals based on a variety of datasets. Microsoft themselves have...
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Harry Potter and the Chat Bot
So kids birthday in lockdown - what you gonna do? Can't really go anywhere or do anything - so how to make something exciting and memorable? Well I'll tell you what I did - I created them a chatbot....
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Oracle on Azure - an Inventory
 Well after the roaring success of this post I've had a stream of people (well at least one) knocking at my door to do something similar but showing our Oracle installations in Azure.Now if you're a...
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Bulk tagging in Azure
We've recently added a whole load of 'on prem' resources to Azure via Azure ARC and we wanted to add some extra tags to those resources to display some more useful information about what they are and...
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Using Azure to check a website is up - part 1
 This is the first in a series of 2 posts dealing with how you can use Azure to monitor if a website is up and running and track the response time of that.I've split it into 2 cases - the first...
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Using Azure to check a website is up - part 2 (internal website)
So following on in quick succession (before I forget what I did) - here are the steps to set up monitoring for an internal website using application insights. The catch here is that you cant do it...
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What's locking it out?
This is a post pulling together a few elements/features of Azure to demonstrate how to solve an issue, even if the core use case does not affect you the way the problem is solved can be applied to...
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Azure resource graph - extractjson example
 After another long gap I'm finally putting pen to paper (well fingers to keyboard). This is just a short note to hope fully get me back in the saddle. This one is on resource graph query - one of the...
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The logic app and the resource graph query
A nice simple example of how to utilize azure resource graph from a logic app. In this case we have a use case from some of our alerting definitions to be able to work out from a resource id value of a...
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An end to end process for complete resource graph extracts
So this week I discovered that resource graph (by current favourite Azure tool) has a quite surprising limitation, what is this you ask?Well if you have a reasonable size estate in Azure your resource...
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To reserve or not to reserve?
 To reserve or not to reserve - that is the question... ( as Shakespeare so eloquently put it).If you're looking to save money when running applications in Azure then one of the easiest and least...
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Azure carbon footprint calculator
 Sustainability is rightly at the top of many companies agendas right now, for us as an energy producer we are acutely aware of our responsibilities here and we have made a number of key statements and...
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How much storage am i using?
We were recently asked how much Azure storage we are actually using - initially I thought this was going to be a simple thing to find out - but actually it turned out to be a little more complex than I...
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