Microsoft announced a couple of Azure management improvements this week.
The Azure Alerting capability has reached "general availability" status, meaning that Microsoft sees it as ready for commercial use. The Azure Alerting feature currently allows IT pros to set up alerts for eight Azure services. They can select specific details to monitor and get an e-mail or notice when certain thresholds are breached.
Azure Alerting, while ready for deployment today, gets accessed through the Azure Portal management console. The Azure Portal is still at the preview stage, though. It may seem confusing to use a finished product via a beta product, but that seems to be the case with Microsoft's Azure Alerting feature.
In addition, Microsoft issued a preview this week of the ability to "create alerts on operational events." Examples of operational events that might get flagged include the deletion of virtual machines, the stopping of a Web site or template deployment failures, according to the announcement. This operational event alert feature also gets configured by IT pros through the Azure Portal preview, but Microsoft indicated it plans to extend it to other Azure management products in the near future.
The Azure Alerting feature and the RBAC preview were the two main management nuggets to be found in Microsoft's very long list of Azure improvements announced this week. However, there were a few other highlights.
Microsoft also enhanced its Azure Websites service such that it can access Azure Virtual Networks resources. The WordPress service running on Azure Websites now features a "scalable CMS [content management system]." Lastly, Microsoft added backup options to Azure Websites, allowing users to choose the destination, choose SQL or MySQL databases via a Web site's connection strings, and restore to either a new site or to a "deployment slot on a site."