Automating Azure Instrumentation and Monitoring – Part 1: Introduction

14th of November, 2018 / John Downs / 1 Comment

Instrumentation and monitoring is a critical part of managing any application or system. By proactively monitoring the health of the system as a whole, as well as each of its components, we can mitigate potential issues before they affect customers. And if issues do occur, good instrumentation alerts us to that fact so that we can respond quickly.

Azure provides a set of powerful monitoring and instrumentation tools to instrument almost all Azure services as well as our own applications.… [Keep reading] “Automating Azure Instrumentation and Monitoring – Part 1: Introduction”

Measure O365 ATP Safe Attachments Latency using PowerShell

19th of July, 2018 / ahmadkabdalla / 1 Comment

Microsoft Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) is a cloud based security service that is part of the O365 E5 offering. Also can be separately added to other O365 subscriptions. Now a lot can be learned about ATP from here. But in this post we’re going to extract data corresponding to one of ATP’s primary features; ATP Safe Attachments.

In short, ATP Safe Attachments scans documents for malicious content and can block these attachments depending on the policy configuration.… [Keep reading] “Measure O365 ATP Safe Attachments Latency using PowerShell”

Querying against an Azure SQL Database using Azure Automation Part 1

5th of July, 2018 / ahmadkabdalla / 1 Comment

What if you wanted to leverage Azure automation to analyse database entries and send some statistics or even reports on a daily or weekly basis?
Well why would you want to do that?

On demand compute:
- You may not have access to a physical server. Or your computer isn’t powerful enough to handle huge data processing. Or you would definitely do not want to wait in the office for the task to complete before leaving on a Friday evening.

… [Keep reading]

Automate network share migrations to Sharepoint Online using ShareGate PowerShell

7th of June, 2018 / Vibhu Kuchhal / 2 Comments

Sharegate supports PowerShell scripting which can be used to automate and schedule migrations. In this post, I am going to demonstrate an example of end to end automation to migrate network Shares to SharePoint Online. The process effectively reduces the task of executing migrations to “just flicking a switch”.

Pre-Migration

The following pre-migration activities were conducted before the actual migration:

Analysis of Network Shares
Discussions with stakeholders from different business units to identify content needs
Pilot migrations to identify average throughput capability of migration environment
Identification of acceptable data filtration criteria, and prepare Sharegate migration template files based on business requirements
Derive a migration plan from above steps

Migration Automation flow

The diagram represents a high-level flow of the process:

The migration automation was implemented to execute the following steps:

Migration team indicates that migration(s) are ready to be initiated by updating the list item(s) in the SharePoint list
Updated item(s) are detected by a PowerShell script polling the SharePoint list
The list item data is downloaded as a CSV file.

… [Keep reading]

Utilizing Sharegate migration Templates for Network share migrations

29th of May, 2018 / Vibhu Kuchhal / No Comments

Sharegate supports PowerShell based scripting which can be used to automate and schedule migrations. The purpose of this post is to demonstrate the use of pre-created migration templates to initiate migration tasks in Sharegate using PowerShell scripts. In one of my previous project, we were migrating network shares to SharePoint Online using Sharegate as the migration tool of choice.

Based on our discussions with business divisions and IT department, the following requirements were identified for most of the divisions:

Office documents, PDFs, Image files will be migrated
Include only documents modified after a date for e.g.

… [Keep reading]

Deploying an Active Directory Forest using AWS CloudFormation

27th of May, 2018 / Nivlesh Chandra / 1 Comment

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com

Introduction

Wow, it is amazing how time flies. Almost two years ago, I wrote a set of blogs that showed how one can use Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates and Desired State Configuration (DSC) scripts to deploy an Active Directory Forest automatically.
For those that would like to take a trip down memory lane, here is the link to the blog.
Recently, I have been playing with AWS CloudFormation and I am simply in awe by its power.… [Keep reading] “Deploying an Active Directory Forest using AWS CloudFormation”

Enterprise-ready testing in Xamarin

8th of May, 2018 / Pulkit Sethi / No Comments

As focus moves towards mobile-first development, enterprise developers should also focus on automated testing. In an enterprise setting, we like to test for merge conflicts, sync issues, authentication failures, etc and we need to test this on hundreds of devices.
In this post, we will look at how we can set UI test project and application code so that we can test against scenarios that we face in a real-life situation (no connection, sync issues, authentication failures).… [Keep reading] “Enterprise-ready testing in Xamarin”

Automate SharePoint Document Libraries Management using Flow, Azure Functions and SharePoint CSOM

30th of January, 2018 / Asish Padhy / 1 Comment

I’ve been working on a client requirement to automate SharePoint library management via scripts to implement a document lifecycle with many document libraries that have custom content types and requires regular housekeeping for ownership and permissions.
Solution overview
To provide a seamless user experience, we decided to do the following:

1. Create a document library template (.stp) with all the prerequisite folders and content types applied.

2. Create a list to store the data about entries for said libraries.… [Keep reading] “Automate SharePoint Document Libraries Management using Flow, Azure Functions and SharePoint CSOM”

Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 3)

9th of January, 2018 / Bobbie Couhbor / 1 Comment

Hopefully you’ve had the chance to follow along in parts 1 and 2 where we set up our Lex chatbot to take and validate input. In this blog, we’ll interface with our Active Directory environment to perform the password reset function. To do this, we need to create a Lambda function that will be used as the logic to fulfil the user’s intent. The Lambda function will be packaged with the python LDAP library to modify the AD password attribute for the user.… [Keep reading] “Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 3)”

Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 2)

20th of December, 2017 / Bobbie Couhbor / No Comments

Welcome back! Hopefully you had the chance to follow along in part 1 where we started creating our Lex chatbot. In part 2, we attempt to make the conversation more human-like and begin integrating data validation on our slots to ensure we’re getting the correct input.

Creating the Lambda initialisation and validation function

As data validation requires compute, we’ll need to start by creating an AWS Lambda function. Head over to the AWS console, then navigate to the AWS Lambda page.… [Keep reading] “Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 2)”