Tag Archives: Microsoft Azure

29 Jun

Using Terraform to manage Azure vWAN

Using Terraform to manage Azure vWAN

A few weeks ago I delivered a webinar about the Azure Virtual WAN (vWAN) for the polish audience. The Azure vWAN service is nice and worth mentioning by itself but I wanted to share something different. The way you can automate the deployment of the Azure vWAN using the Terraform. I try to automate all the things I do in the public cloud. It is quite rare that I will perform such a configuration only once. So my natural approach to creating the webinar lab was programming is in the IaaC model. It worked nicely. Since the webinar, I used this code three times already.

If you want to test the vWAN by yourself, or you are interested in how to automate the vWAN management using the Terraform (my favorite tool lately), check the Szkola DevNet’s (my DevNet education project for the polish speaking audience) GitHub, where I put complete Terraform script. Using it, you can create a simple vWAN topology with two hubs, a VPN connection to another VNet, some VNet Peering, and of course, routing.

https://github.com/SzkolaDevNet/Terraform-Azure-vWAN

26 May

Why having cloud load-balancer for on-premises services is not a good idea?

Cloud load-balancer for on-premise services is not a good idea

We were thinking about redundancy options for CCIE.PL today. There are few restrictions we have there, both came either from policy or our personal thoughts about several aspects of paid services and sharing admin access. But simply we are thinking how to automate failover in case our primary server or database have problems. Easiest solution would be to use Cloudflare free tier service but let’s say we don’t want to do this now. So we were looking on the other options and there was an idea that maybe we can use cloud load-balancer for on-premise services. First thought – it’s brilliant. On second thought – definitely that idea was wrong. Let me show you why.

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19 Apr

How to add network device to Microsoft Operations Management Suite using syslog

How to add network device to Microsoft Operations Management Suite using syslog

Microsoft Operations Management Suite is nice, and in some cases free, tool to manage and search through logs. But it’s dedicated to Windows and Linux operating systems by default. In many environments, especially those most secure ones, huge amount of logs are generated by network devices. Firewalls placed on the edge between Internet and DMZ zone quite often are set up to log all denied connections. Those firewalls can produce significant volume of logs that need to be searched and analyzed. Microsoft Operations Management Suite seems to be perfect tool for that but there is no native support of such feature. But we can implement this doing small workaround. Let’s look how to add network device to Microsoft Operations Management Suite using syslog.

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13 Apr

Microsoft Operations Management Suite – powerful log analyzer in Azure (in 10 minutes for free)

Collecting and processing logs from all systems and network devices can be a nightmare for any systems admin. Searching through them and performing security audits can be a nightmare for security team if collector engine is not powerful enough to process queries in efficient time. Microsoft Operations Management Suite is interesting solution to answer both those problems and add much more analysis giving administrators visibility and control across on-premise and cloud installations.

Microsoft Operations Management Suite runs in Azure which means it’s extremely fast in processing the data. Millions of records are not problem for OMS so we can get Insights and Analytics of what is happening on our servers or workstations, detect and respond to threads or apply proper protection or even put in place some automation in controlling. It’s quick to setup and for many users it can be for free!

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