Cloud Pro: Azure Management and Monitoring: Choose, Compare and Launch

What's inside

1. Level 1: The Azure Ops Toolkit on One PageFree
   Lay out every Azure management and monitoring service on one map, grouped by the job it does: monitoring and logging, tracing, infrastructure as code, configuration and patching, inventory and governance, cost, and advice and health. Each service is listed with its current name and the names it used to have.
2. Level 2: Build a Standard Operations ProfileFree
   Write a reusable operations profile that records the facts behind every later decision: estate size and environments, telemetry volume and retention, SLOs and alerting, IaC and change control, patching, cost allocation, guardrails, team skills and cost model.
3. Level 3: Azure Monitor: Metrics, Alerts and Workbooks
   Cover Azure Monitor's platform metrics, alert rules, action groups and workbooks in nine parts: fit, documented limits, what metric and alert-rule pricing depends on, who operates what, pros and cons, real uses, a CLI and Bicep quick start with clean-up, and when to choose or avoid it.
4. Level 4: Log Analytics and Data Collection
   Run Log Analytics workspaces and the Azure Monitor Agent with data collection rules as a service of their own, with most of the focus on what drives cost: ingestion per GB, table plans (Analytics, Basic, Auxiliary), commitment tiers, retention and archive, and filtering data before it is ingested.
5. Level 5: Application Insights and Distributed Tracing
   Use workspace-based Application Insights with OpenTelemetry for requests, dependencies and end-to-end traces, including sampling and daily caps, the limits that bite at scale, and the trade-off between keeping more telemetry and paying for it.
6. Level 6: Managed Prometheus and Managed Grafana
   Cover Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus and Azure Managed Grafana in nine parts: metrics ingestion and query pricing, Grafana tiers and instance costs, scrape and series limits, what you still run yourself, and a quick start against an AKS cluster.
7. Level 7: Resource Manager, Bicep and Deployment Stacks
   Treat Azure Resource Manager as a deployment engine you drive with Bicep, using what-if previews, deployment scopes, and deployment stacks to manage resource lifecycles and deny settings, together with the deployment limits and quotas that catch teams out.
8. Level 8: Azure Update Manager
   Run patching with Azure Update Manager across Azure and Arc-enabled machines, covering periodic assessment, maintenance configurations, dynamic scopes, hotpatching, per-server pricing for Arc machines, and how it replaced Automation Update Management.
9. Level 9: Automation and Machine Configuration
   Separate what Azure Automation runbooks still do well from what Machine Configuration (formerly Guest Configuration) should take over for configuration enforcement, including pricing, limits, and the retirement path for Automation State Configuration (DSC).
10. Level 10: Azure Resource Graph for Inventory
    Query the whole estate in seconds with Azure Resource Graph and KQL, covering resource change history, throttling and paging limits, Resource Graph Explorer, and how it feeds dashboards and automation.
11. Level 11: Azure Lighthouse for Multi-Tenant Operations
    Manage resources across tenants with Azure Lighthouse delegations, covering eligible authorizations, which roles can and cannot be delegated, how monitoring and Resource Graph work across tenants, and when cross-tenant access is the wrong tool.
12. Level 12: Cost Management and Billing
    Use Cost Management and Billing with a focus on scopes, cost analysis, budgets, anomaly alerts, scheduled exports, and how billing account types (EA, MCA, CSP) change what you can see and do.
13. Level 13: Azure Advisor and Acting on Recommendations
    Treat Azure Advisor as a source of ranked to-do items across cost, reliability, performance, operational excellence and security, covering how to configure, suppress, alert on and query recommendations at scale instead of letting them pile up.
14. Level 14: Service Health and Resource Health
    Tell the difference between Azure-wide incidents, planned maintenance, health advisories and retirement notices in Service Health, and per-resource status in Resource Health, and route each one to the people who need to act.
15. Level 15: Policy and Management Groups in Brief
    Recap only the parts of Azure Policy and the management group hierarchy that operations depends on: tag inheritance, policies that deploy monitoring agents and diagnostics, and where guardrails belong. The deeper security material stays in the security course.
16. Level 16: Retirements Round-Up and Migrations
    Gather every retirement covered so far into a list with dates checked against the docs: the Log Analytics agent, Automation Update Management, classic Application Insights, Automation State Configuration, and any others announced. Then plan the migrations they require.
17. Level 17: SLOs and Alerts People Can Act On
    Turn service level objectives into error budgets and burn-rate alerts in Azure Monitor and Prometheus, so every page is urgent and actionable and points to a runbook, and noisy alerts get retired.
18. Level 18: Infrastructure as Code and Drift Control
    Keep the live estate matching what is in code by combining pipelines, what-if and plan checks, deployment stack deny settings, Resource Graph change detection and Policy, and decide how to handle emergency changes made in the portal.
19. Level 19: Tagging, Cost Allocation and FinOps
    Build a tagging scheme and allocation model that let each team see and own its spend, using inherited tags, cost allocation rules for shared costs, FOCUS-format exports and a regular FinOps review routine.
20. Level 20: Running Operations at Scale
    Combine the toolkit into one operating model for hundreds of subscriptions: landing zone layout, central versus per-team workspaces, Azure Monitor baseline alerts, subscription vending, and the API and throttling limits that appear only at scale.
21. Level 21: Worked Telemetry Cost: The Small Estate
    Estimate the monthly telemetry bill for a small estate, line by line, from the operations profile: GB ingested per source, retention, metrics, alert rules and Application Insights. Then apply the cost levers and see how much each one saves.
22. Level 22: Worked Telemetry Cost: The Large Multi-Team Estate
    Scale the telemetry estimate up to a large estate with several subscriptions and teams, using Managed Prometheus, centralised and team-owned workspaces, commitment tiers and chargeback, and find where the cost curve bends.
23. Level 23: Build the Weighted Selection Scorecard
    Turn the standard operations profile into a weighted scorecard with criteria, weights, scoring rules and evidence requirements, so services and clouds can be compared consistently.
24. Level 24: Score Azure Against Another Cloud With Evidence
    Use the scorecard to compare Azure's management and monitoring toolkit with the equivalent services on a second cloud, citing dated documentation for limits, prices and retirements.
25. Level 25: Final Challenge: Decision Workshop and Selection Record Exam
    Bring the whole course together in a decision workshop for a realistic estate: build the profile, choose the services, cost the telemetry, plan the launch, then defend the choice in a one-page selection record.

Access

The first 2 levels are free with a free account. Every level, the podcast edition and the AI tutor come with All Access at £4.99/month or any Creator plan — see pricing.

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