In order to onboard our Windows Servers into Log Analytics,
you're probably thinking, well,
do we need in a hybrid cloud a site‑to‑site VPN or an ExpressRoute circuit?
The answer to that is no.
You might be thinking,
what if we have air gapped virtual LANs that can't get
out onto the internet by policy?
Does that mean we cannot use Log Analytics?
Again, the answer is no.
There's a solution for that.
First though, let's take a look at naming confusion and let me sort that out.
Originally Log Analytics and these cloud‑based management solutions were a
separate product family called Operations Management Suite,
or OMS.
Microsoft has done a good job over the last years to bring all of
those services into Azure natively; however,
you will occasionally see OMS in the user interface.
Don't be shocked or surprised,
that's just a remnant from the original days of the product.
You can just ignore it.
The Log Analytics agent sometimes, as you saw a couple slides ago,
is referred to as the Microsoft Monitoring Agent,
or MMA, more recently the Log Analytics agent.
And at least as of this recording in summer 2022,
the agent is called Azure Monitor agent,
or AMA.
Yes, it's confusing.
The story has been kind of messy with this.
The best I understand, from my friends at Microsoft,
is that Microsoft plans to standardize on Azure Monitor agent,
and I've heard stories that Microsoft is making tweaks to the
software to where it will include some of that guest monitoring
capability that we talked about earlier.
So,
I imagine we can eventually see the Azure VM diagnostics
extension going away and having just one agent to rule them
all for hybrid cloud monitoring, AMA, Azure Monitor agent.
Now what does this mean on your AZ‑801 certification exam?
I'm not sure which of these terms you'll see,
but as long as you see them here now and you understand that they're synonymous,
you're good to go, all right?
Now, what is our reach, or scope, with Log Analytics?
You can absolutely and easily onboard Windows and Linux Azure VMs,
you can onboard VMs in other clouds like EC2 instances from AWS,
and you can also onboard physical and virtual
machines from your local data centers.
How do we do that deployment?
Well, you can use the Azure portal for Azure VMs.
That's super easy to do.
If you're going to do deployments at scale,
I would suggest that you use ARM JSON, or Bicep deployment templates.
You just simply include a reference to the Log Analytics agent
to onboard the machine at deployment time.
That way, you can manually install the agent.
I'll show you how to get the MSI or the Linux installer.
If you're using System Center Configuration Manager or
another configuration manager solution,
it's pretty easy because the Log Analytics agent for Windows is
a standard Windows Installer MSI package.
Azure policy has been gaining great ground over the last
years in terms of being a universal compliance and
configuration management platform.
It's really impressive.
We can absolutely check whether a monitored machine has
the Log Analytics agent installed, and if not,
Azure policy can automate that for us.
And lastly, in a hybrid cloud, multi‑cloud environment,
you may want to have a more formal relationship between that remote
machine and Azure Resource Manager in your subscription.
This is what's called an Arc‑enabled server.
So as you can see,
there's plenty of options for on boarding your Windows Server machines,
no matter where they are, into Log Analytics.
And because Log Analytics is using TCP 443 HTTPS and TLS encryption, we're not concerned about firewall ports and protocols.