Cloud Platform Release Announcements for May 21, 2018

  • Article

Azure DevOps Tool Integrations | Disclosure—Terraform OSS Resource Provider in Azure Resource Manager

Aligned Event: 05/07/2018 — 05/09/2018 — Microsoft Build 2018

We're announcing a private preview of a new Azure Resource Provider, Microsoft.TerraformOSS. The goal of this Resource Provider is to allow customers to manage resources that have a Terraform provider through Azure Resource Manager in the same way as they can manage native Azure resources. Initial Terraform providers that will be supported are Kubernetes, Cloudflare, and Datadog.

To learn more, read the blog post.

Azure security and operations management | Log alerts for Application Insights—GA

We are happy to announce the general availability of log alerts for Application Insights, an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for web developers building and managing apps on multiple platforms. Customers use Application Insights to monitor live web applications, detect performance anomalies, diagnose issues, and to understand usage patterns. In addition to the alerts on application health based on different metrics, you can now monitor even log files by setting up a query to run at specified intervals, and trigger alerts based on the result. For example, let’s say you deployed a new fix for a specific exception and want to make sure it doesn’t surface again. You can now set up an alert to trigger if that exception appears in your Application Insights trace file.

To learn more, read the full blog post.

SAP HANA certification for M-series VMs and Write Accelerator GA release | Disclosure

Announcing the SAP HANA certification for Azure M-series virtual machines (VMs). Customers can run their production SAP HANA workloads on Azure M-series VMs with this certification. M-series VMs offer up to 128 vCPUs and memory from 1 TB to 4 TB, enabling in-memory database workloads such as SAP HANA and high performance database workloads such as SQL Server.

We also recently announced the general availability of Write Accelerator for M-series VMs, to accelerate database writes such as log transactions to sub-millisecond performance. Write Accelerator is required for production SAP HANA workloads on M-series.

To learn more, read the full blog post.

Azure Cosmos DB | Async Cosmos DB Java SDK – public preview

New Async Java SDK for Azure Cosmos DB in preview

Now in preview, the new asynchronous Java SDK for the Azure Cosmos DB SQL API is now open sourced on GitHub. This SDK uses the popular RxJava library to add a new asynchronous API surface area for composing event-based programs with observable sequences.

To learn more, read the full blog post.

Azure SQL Database | Vulnerability Assessment now available

Vulnerability Assessment for Azure SQL Database now generally available

Now generally available, Vulnerability Assessment for Azure SQL provides you with a one-stop-shop to discover, track, and remediate potential database vulnerabilities. It gives visibility into your security state, includes actionable steps to investigate, manages and resolves security issues, and enhances your database fortifications. The feature is now also part of a new security package for your Azure SQL Database, known as SQL Advanced Threat Protection, that provides a single go-to location for advanced SQL security capabilities, including Threat Detection, Vulnerability Assessment, and Information Protection.

Azure SQL Data Warehouse | Query performance improvement

SQL Data Warehouse replicated tables now generally available for boosting query performance

Azure SQL Data Warehouse now delivers the ability to distribute your data across the instance for faster query response time and increased data transformation throughput. Replicated tables allow for a schema design where dimension data is available on all compute nodes. This reduces the need to move data at runtime and thus queries run faster.

Find out more.

Power BI Embedded | May feature roundup

Power BI Embedded feature roundup—new features now GA

The following new features are now available in Power BI Embedded:

Custom report Tooltips and Q&A Explorer

New Azure Resource Metrics

In  a recent blog post we announced the integration of Azure Monitor Metrics to be used on Power BI Embedded resources. This month, we're releasing three new metrics that, in addition to existing metrics, will give a good view of the status and performance of your resource:

  • Memory—Shows the usage of memory in your resource. The units are in gigabytes (GB) so you can track exactly how much of your RAM is being used every minute.
  • Memory thrashing—Shows the percentage of memory being thrashed from the RAM of your resource, relative to the total size of RAM in the resource. Note that this metric is relevant only for Import mode datasets, since they're hosting data in-memory. Data sets using DirectQuery or Live connection to Analysis Service are not monitored by this metric.
  • QPU high utilization—Tracks the load on the query processing units on your resource. Every minute, the metric checks if your resource’s QPU usage has exceeded 80 percent utilization of the resource so you can check for a potential case of performance degradation.

Setting up Alerts on your Azure resource

Power BI Embedded in Azure, which allows you to use monitoring metrics to track your resource performance and load, has been integrated with Azure Alerts. Alerts offers a method of monitoring in Azure that allows you to configure conditions over data and to be notified when the conditions match the latest monitoring data. When you have an active Power BI Embedded resource, you can use the Metrics that monitors your resource and define rules over those metrics.

Read more at our Power BI developer blog.