With all the changes in Azure, it is sometimes hard to keep track, that's why I thought I would give you a quick update on two exciting things I learned this week. In this update, I want to share a couple of things like a great article on the general availability Azure Monitor for VMs, how you can take Microsoft certification exams online, the new Deploy to Azure extension for Visual Studio Code and more!

General availability of Azure Monitor for virtual machines

This week the Azure Monitor team announced the general availability of Azure Monitor for virtual machines (VMs), which provides an in-depth view of VM performance trends and dependencies.

Azure Monitor for virtual machines

Azure Monitor for VMs brings together critical monitoring data about your Windows and Linux VMs, allowing you to:

Troubleshoot guest-level performance issues and understand trends in VM resource utilization.

Determine whether back-end VM dependencies are correctly connected and which clients of a VM may be affected by any issues the VM is having.

Discover VM hotspots at scale based on resource utilization, connection metrics, performance trends, and alerts.

You can find more information about Azure Monitor for virtual machines on the official announcement blog.

New Deploy to Azure extension for Visual Studio Code

This week, Microsoft Azure Senior Program Manager Pulkit Agarwal, announced the launch of the Deploy to Azure extension for Visual Studio Code. This new extension allows developers working in Visual Studio Code to seamlessly create, build, and continuously deploy their apps to the cloud without leaving VS Code.

Deploy to Azure VS Code Extension

It helps developers and IT Pros by generating a CI/CD pipeline definition to deploy applications on Azure. Deploy to Azure extensions work with Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions.

You can read the full announcement here.

Implement Center for Internet Security (CIS) recommendations for Azure

This week on ITOpsTalk, we also had a great blog post by Sonia Cuff about how you can implement Center for Internet Security (CIS) recommendations for Azure. The CIS Microsoft Azure Foundations Benchmark recommendations have recently been added to Azure Policy, including HIPAA, PCI, NIST, UK NHS, and more.

CIS Microsoft Azure Foundations Benchmark recommendations have recently been added to Azure PolicyIf you want to learn more about how you can use Azure Policy or even Azure Blueprints to implement the CIS Microsoft Azure Foundations Benchmark recommendations, check out our blog post on ITOpsTalk.com and the announcement blog New Azure Blueprint for CIS Benchmark.

How to take Microsoft Certification Exams Online

Many of us currently have no other choice to stay and work from home. Some of us have some reduced work backlog and can invest some time into learning and taking Microsoft certification exams.

Since most of the local test centers are closed, I wrote a short blog post on how you can take Microsoft Certification Exams online.

I wish you a lovely weekend and I hope this short blog post provided you with some exciting news from this week. I know there is much more than just the things I listed here. I recommend that you follow the Azure announcements blog. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

Also, check out last week's Az Update here.