Speaking at the Inside Azure Management Summit

A few months back, I was part of the authoring team who worked on the latest release of our free Inside Azure Management book. Following on from the continued success and popularity of the book, we've decided to host the inaugural (and also free) 'Inside Azure Management Virtual Summit'.

We're kicking off on Thursday 23rd July as a full-day event and we've got a bunch of MVP's, Microsoft employees and well-known Community members on-board to present the latest and greatest content in the Azure Management space.

I'll be presenting a session titled 'Getting Started with Azure Migrations' where I'll walk you through all of the things you will need to consider to ensure you get your on-premises workloads up into the cloud.

You can check out all of the sessions that we have planned for the day here and you can register for the summit at the following link:

https://insideazuremgmt.com/tickets/

I'm really looking forward to catching up with everyone online next week and I'm sure I'll learn a bunch of new tips and tricks from some of the other presenters sessions on the day.

See you all there hopefully!

Just Released: Inside Azure Management Book

I'm happy to announce that we're ready to publish our new book titled 'Inside Azure Management'.

Our hope for this book is that it will become the market leader in the Azure Management space and when you consider the team of authors and technical reviewers that are involved, this should be easily achievable!

I had an epic time working on this book and it was a pleasure to collaborate again with my good friends and co-authors Stanislav Zhelyazkov, Tao Yang, Anders Bengtsson and Pete Zerger.

Pete was the 'ringmaster' who kept us all organised and on-track with deadlines and we were supported by the valued insights of the following technical-ninja reviewers:

• Billy York
• Ryan Irujo
• Janaka Rangama
• Adin Ermie
• Ravi Yadav

This book is a complete re-write from it's predecessor (Inside the Operations Management Suite) and the goal is to bring our readers on a journey through the sometimes complex and always awesome Azure Management technology stack of services.

In the cloud game, it's nearly impossible to know everything about everything and I definitely learned some new tricks as I read through the chapters that my co-authors worked on. The chapters I wrote focused on Azure Migration, Azure Infrastructure Monitoring and Azure Disaster Recovery.

Here's the full list of topics we've covered across the book:

• Implementing Governance in Azure
• Migrating Workloads in Azure
• Configuring Data Sources for Azure Log Analytics
• Monitoring Applications
• Monitoring Infrastructure
• Alerting and Notification
• Monitoring Databases in Azure
• Monitoring Containers in Azure
• Implementing Process Automation
• Implementing Configuration Management
• Monitoring Security-Related Configuration
• Data Backup for Azure Workloads
• Implementing a Disaster Recovery Strategy
• Update Management for VMs

All of the authors and technical reviewers are strong advocates in the Azure Management community and to give something back, we've decided to release this book as a free download to anyone who wants it.

You can grab your free copy of the book from the Technet Gallery here:

http://tinyurl.com/InsideAzureManagement


Please report errata to insidemscloud@outlook.com and we'll work through any feedback we receive there.

Available Now: Inside the Microsoft Operations Management Suite (V2)

These past few months have been pretty hectic for me and as a result, this blog had to take a back seat for a while. Along with the day job, presenting at conferences and some family vacation time, I've been busy working with the team on an updated release of the awesome 'Inside the Microsoft Operations Management Suite' book.

The original release of this book was an essential 'must-have' for anybody working with Microsoft's Operations Management Suite (OMS) and it was a constant reference for me over the last year and a half while I tried to get my head around this new technology. As is always the case with cloud technologies however, things change at a drastic pace and an updated release of the original book was duly needed.

Meet the Team

With so many new features added to OMS, this update was never going to be a quick and easy task. Thankfully, the full original authoring team of Stan, Tao, Pete and Anders signed up again for the new release (bio's below):

Along with the original authors, a new team of technical editors (myself included) were brought on-board to help get this over the line:

What's it about?

This updated release provides readers with an end-to-end deep dive into the full range of Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) features and functionality, complete with downloadable sample scripts.

Here's a rundown of the chapters to give you a good idea of the type of content you'll learn about:

Chapter 1: Introduction and Onboarding 
Chapter 2: Searching and Presenting OMS Data 
Chapter 3: Process Automation 
Chapter 4: Configuration Management 
Chapter 5: Change & Update Management 
Chapter 6: Extending OMS Using Log Search 
Chapter 7: Alert Management 
Chapter 8: Log Management & Performance Data 
Chapter 9: Azure & Office 365 Solutions 
Chapter 10: Service Map & Wire Data 
Chapter 11: Network Performance Monitor 
Chapter 12: Other OMS Solutions  
Chapter 13: Assessment Solutions 
Chapter 14: Security & Compliance 
Chapter 15: Protection & Recovery 
Chapter 16: ITSM Integration 
Chapter 17: Custom OMS Solutions

How much will it cost?

Keeping with the community spirit behind the first book, this release will be COMPLETELY FREE for download in E-Book format with the Kindle and Paperback versions coming to Amazon a couple months later. Keep in mind that the Kindle and Paperback versions will carry a nominal price to help cover production costs.

Download Info

You can download the e-book version right now from the link below and the Kindle and Paperback versions will be available on Amazon over the coming months:

 http://tinyurl.com/insideomsbook

Hopefully you enjoy reading this book and working through all the demos as much as we did and if you've any comments/requests, please ping them to the email address here.

Available Now: Getting Started with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager

Finally after many months of writing (and the primary reason this blog has been so quiet), my third book has been published and is ready to go.

Overview

The idea for this book came about after many requests from my customers and people I meet through the System Center community asking how to get started on the basics with their OpsMgr/SCOM deployments once they have it deployed.

SCOM is a complex beast of a product and a lot of deployments I've seen out there aren't using even half of the capabilities it has to offer (distributed applications and dashboards in particular). You'd be surprised how many people simply install it, deploy agents to everything in their environment, import as many management packs as they can find and then configure a single SMTP notification subscription that forwards all alerts to their inbox.

This only leads to alert noise, frustration, the inevitable cursing of the product by users and eventually, it'll be replaced with a different monitoring tool. Thankfully, with the correct guidance, these deployments don't have to be assigned to the monitoring tool graveyard. With a little know-how and help in the right direction, SCOM can be transformed into an IT enablement tool that can deliver full monitoring visibility and streamlined management into your environments.

Hopefully, this book can equip readers with the know-how they need to make the most of their new SCOM environments!

What's Inside?
This book contains detailed content to help you get up and running with new deployments of both SCOM 2016 and SCOM 2012 R2. I've tried to keep things as simple as possible with each chapter building on the previous one while delivering tips, tricks and best practice recommendations along the way.

Here's the chapter list:

Chapter 1 - Introduction to System Center Operations Manager

Chapter 2 - Installing System Center Operations Manager

Chapter 3 - Exploring the Consoles

Chapter 4 - Deploying Agents

Chapter 5 - Working with Management Packs

Chapter 6 - Managing Network Devices

Chapter 7 - Configuring Service Models with Distributed Applications

Chapter 8 - Alert Tuning the Easy Way

Chapter 9 - Visualizing Your IT with Dashboards

Chapter 10 - Creating Alert Subscriptions and Reports

Chapter 11 - Backing Up, Performing Maintenance and Troubleshooting

Target Audience
The target audience for this book is the IT Pro or System Administrator who wants to deploy and use SCOM but has no previous knowledge of the product.

As a ‘Getting Started' book, the primary objective is to equip you with the knowledge you need to feel comfortable when working with common monitoring scenarios in SCOM. With this in mind, deep-diving into less-common features such as Audit Collection Services (ACS), Agentless Exception Monitoring (AEM) and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) has been intentionally omitted.

If you're already familiar with SCOM and have a good grasp of the basic concepts, you should still find the content useful - particularly the chapters that discuss configuring your distributed application models, tuning alerts and creating dashboards from the ground up.

Where Can You Get It?

The book is available in both paperback and e-book format and can be downloaded from all of the usual suppliers. If you have an Amazon account, then you can order it directly from the following links:

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Hope you enjoy the content and thanks for your support!

Free eBook - System Center Operations Manager Field Experience

A couple of months ago, the guys over at Microsoft Press released a new free ebook titled 'System Center Operations Manager Field Experience'.

At 128 pages, it delivers some 'quick-hit' tips and tricks on deploying and managing SCOM in the real world and after reading through it today, I can confirm that there's some very useful pointers that you should take note of - particularly related to enhancing SCOM performance.

You don't have to read this book from front-to-back right away and instead, it can be used as a guide whenever you need to get some additional advice from the team of Premier Field and Support Escalation Engineers that authored it.

You can download it in a number of electronic formats from here:

http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/ebooks#9780735695825

SCOM - Free eBook - Extending Operations Manager Reporting

The team over at Microsoft Press have been busy putting together another free eBook for your System Center reading pleasure. This one is 122 pages of goodness on how to work with and author reports in your SCOM environments.

Here's an introduction to its content:

The System Center Operations Manager data warehouse stores many objects, making it possible to report on performance, availability, configuration, and security. You can use data collected by Operations Manager for issue tracking, awareness, planning, and forecasting, all of which are important factors for maintaining and managing your environment. But understanding what to report on and how to do so is what actually contributes to the stability of your infrastructure.

If you're not using the data you collect about your environment, you're simply wasting space. If you use Operations Manager to monitor your environment, whether your infrastructure or a public, private, or hybrid cloud, this book is a good resource to help you understand the basics of reporting and how to build queries and stored procedures for your reports. It can also help you understand the various elements of Operations Manager management packs that are used when you create reports.

This book assumes that you have a good understanding of Operations Manager and the management pack structure required to create custom reports. It also assumes that you have a good working knowledge of SQL Server and tools like Report Builder, Business Intelligence Development Suite, and SQL Server Data Tools.

The book was authored by George Wallace, Chris Jones, Bill May, Fred Lee, edited by Mitch Tulloch and had contributions from Kevin Holman and Alban Montanera.

If you are in any way serious about delivering deep-level and easy-to-consume reports back to either your own or your customer SCOM deployments, then this book is as good a starting point as any to get you going.

Oh, and did I also mention it's FREE!

Download the book in your electronic format of choice from the Official Microsoft Press Blog here.

If this is something that interests you and you know that you'll have plenty of spare time over the upcoming Xmas holiday period, then why not check out all the other 'FREE' eBooks that MS Press have to offer from the link below:

http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/ebooks#9780735695788

Enjoy!

Available Now - Mastering Windows Server 2012 R2

Just before the Christmas break, it was a nice surprise to see the postman had delivered a package that essentially represented the best part of 12 months of hard work for me - mostly working into the early hours of the morning after the day job finished.

This delivery was none other than the 'dead tree' format of my new book...

Late last year and not too long after our 'Mastering System Center 2012 - Operations Manager' book hit the shelves, I was given the opportunity to head up an excellent team of authors to work on a book that would cover the original release of Windows Server 2012. The book was essentially an update to the excellent 'Mastering Windows Server 2008 R2' book that was led by well known author and speaker Mark Minasi with co-authors like Aidan Finn working their magic throughout. (No pressure on us then!)

This updated Windows Server 2012 book was due to hit the shelves by March/April but when Microsoft announced the upcoming Windows Server 2012 R2 release (codenamed Windows Blue), we just knew we had to re-do our work on the book to keep it consistent and current. What we didn't realise is the sheer volume of extra work that the new R2 release had landed us with and suckers like me who had 8 chapters to work on pretty much had to do a re-write of everything - not to mention labs being rebuilt/upgraded too!

Reading through the full book now though, I can see that all the effort was worth it and I want to say a big thanks to all involved in bringing this to market. There's a great team of authors and editors behind it and if you want to ramp up on your Windows Server 2012 R2 knowledge, then this is a great place to start.

Depending on your country and preference, you can get your hands on a paperback copy of it from the links below:

• Amazon.com
• Amazon.co.uk
• Amazon.de
• Amazon.fr
• Amazon.es
• Amazon.it

Hope you enjoy it!

Available Now on Pre-Order: Mastering Windows Server 2012 R2

If you've been hiding under a rock for the last few months, then you might not be aware that Microsoft have just recently announced the General Availability of Windows Server 2012 R2. The amount of new feature enhancements and additions that come with this release when compared to its  'not-so-long-ago released' predecessor (Windows Server 2012) are unreal.

Late last year and not too long after our 'Mastering System Center 2012 - Operations Manager' book hit the shelves, I was given the opportunity to head up an excellent team of authors to work on a book that would cover the original release of Windows Server 2012. The book was essentially an update to the excellent 'Mastering Windows Server 2008 R2' book that was led by well known author and speaker Mark Minasi with co-authors like Aidan Finn working their magic throughout. (No pressure on us then!)

This updated Windows Server 2012 book was due to hit the shelves by March/April of this year but when Microsoft announced the upcoming Windows Server 2012 R2 release (codenamed Windows Blue), we just knew we had to re-do our work on the book to keep it consistent and current. What we didn't realise is the sheer volume of extra work that the new R2 release had landed us with and suckers like me who had 8 chapters to work on pretty much had to do a re-write of everything - not to mention labs being rebuilt/upgraded too!

Anyway, all that madness is behind us now and the book is available for pre-order on all the usual channels with discounts up to 33% knocked off the RRP on Amazon.

If you want to learn how to master Windows Server 2012 R2, then this is the book for you and you can get it here:

http://amzn.to/1dZcssL