Microsoft Azure Advanced: Balancing Cost and Performance

Name: Microsoft Azure Advanced: Balancing Cost and Performance
Author: Steven Burnley

Learn about cloud cost management and analyze cloud costs and resource performance

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Course: On-Demand

In this lesson, I will show you how to use the Active Directory to create user accounts, create group accounts to organize those users, assign users to groups and then assign those groups to roles, and finally, how to reset user passwords. Let's get started. In order to use the Azure Active Directory administrative tools, we must first search for Azure Active Directory in the search bar at the top of the screen. Let's do that now. You can see Azure Active Directory shows in the suggestions with the blue pyramid icon to the left. Let's select Azure Active Directory now. You can see that we now have the ability to view and manage the user and group accounts in our environment. On the left -hand side of the screen, I'm going to select the user icon. My Azure subscription only includes one user account by default. This cloud user account was created at the time my subscription was created. This is the first administrative account. In order for other administrators to have access to this subscription or for me to provide access to resources in the subscription for users or other applications, you will need to create additional user accounts. Let's take a look at the interface for creating or inviting users to your Azure Active Directory subscription by clicking the new user button at the top of the screen. Here we can see the basic option to create new users, as well as the advanced option to invite external users. Let's take a look at both of these options. If we click create new user, you will see that the user account to be created will have a brand new user account name that will end in at and then the name of your Azure Active Directory domain name. In this case, our domain is called cmp1506outlook . onmicrosoft .com. This is a unique domain name on the internet that has been assigned to the Azure Active Directory and therefore all user accounts created in this subscription will end in that domain name. Organizations do have the option to purchase domain names in order to replace this built -in default name. Let's take a look at that option now. If I navigate back to the Azure Active Directory, we can see the option to apply a domain name to our subscription. In the left -hand side menu, you can see a red icon that says custom domain names. If we click on custom domain names, you see here is an option with an add button at the top of the screen to assign a domain name that has been purchased through a domain name provider and use that for your user accounts. Many organizations will purchase a domain name from a domain name registrar, add that domain name here by proving their ownership, and when you return to the user administration screen, you will see user accounts will end in your new domain name rather than the built -in name that came from your default subscription. Let's go back to the user administration and view that screen one more time. Let's enter in a valid name for another administrator for our environment. I'm going to click in the username box and type in otheradmin for a sample. You can see now that this has essentially created what looks like an email address, otheradmin at cmp1506outlook . onmicrosoft .com. That will be the username associated with this user. Let's type in a friendly name. Now you can see down at the bottom of the screen, an option for determining the password for this initial user account. You can see the option to auto -generate a password is the default, and this initial password has been created in this box. We can click the show password option to see what this looks like. You can see now this system -generated password could be provided to the person that we want to use this account. If we do not wish to use the default passwords created by Azure, we could click let me create the password. This allows you, the administrator, to control the password that you wish to assign this user the first time they log in. In addition to this, you see the option to put them in group accounts or assign them roles. A good rule to remember is that groups do not give users permission. Groups are used to organize people together. We then assign users or groups to roles. That way we have an easy way to combine people by a similar job role and then only assign permissions to the groups that they are a member of. Let's take a look at the advanced option for managing users, which would be to invite an existing user rather than create users in the Azure Active Directory. If we return to the user administration screen and click new user, this time we'll click the advanced option to invite an external user. This is an appropriate way to interact with users who already have a Microsoft account. Users can get Microsoft accounts by signing up for services such as Outlook .com or converting any existing email address into a registered Microsoft account. You also may have a Microsoft account from a different Azure Active Directory. It's very common for organizations to have more than one Azure subscription. If that's the case, an administrator will not have to sign in to multiple subscriptions with different accounts. It's a good practice to use your main account for your organization to control or have permissions for your several or many Azure subscriptions. So, in other words, don't create additional user accounts for users who already can authenticate with a Microsoft subscription through another solution such as Office 365. If your organization has already purchased authentication services from Microsoft, I can simply click on the email address field here and type in an existing Microsoft account email address and click invite. This will send an invitation to the existing Microsoft account, allowing the user to accept the invitation for your environment and set up their initial username and password. In addition to using user and group accounts, we would also like to review the concept of roles. Roles can be assigned to both local Azure Active Directory users and invited users. This allows us to look at some of the many built -in permissions that you can grant to people or groups to allow you to have other administrators do work on portions of the subscription or assign things like reader permissions for those that need to analyze subscriptions from a support standpoint. There are also roles built in here for managing costs and managing quotas, so there are many users who might need to be granted permissions to an Azure subscription beyond the actual engineers that do the work. Thanks for watching. Stay tuned for the next lesson, where I will show you how to integrate your Azure Active Directory with an existing on -premises traditional Microsoft Active Directory, allowing organizations with an investment in an on -premises data center to replicate accounts to the Azure Active Directory as a way to define all the users in your organization only once.

Advanced Provider : Steven Burnley 3 Lessons · 27m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese

Course Description

Optimization includes both cost and performance management. Cloud cost management helps administrators track the costs of implementing their cloud solutions and identify possible opportunities or cost savings. Administrators can use tags to identify resources used by specific solutions and help provide a comprehensive cost for the entire solution. There are also extensive performance analysis tools to analyze metrics associated with system performance. Subscription optimization is accomplished by balancing costs versus performance. Administrators can create thresholds and alerts to be notified when budgets are exceeded, or performance drops below acceptable thresholds. These alerts can be used to send text messages or emails to administrators and also be used to run remediation scripts and create tickets in an existing help desk system. So how do you analyze cloud costs and resource performance?

In this course, you will learn how to optimize your Azure subscription. This includes balancing cost versus performance to deliver adequate services within a predicted budget.

What You'll Learn

View your Azure subscription monthly bill to track cloud spending
Use tags to identify resources used by a specific solution
Track the performance of resources by viewing their metrics
Set up alerts to be notified about performance bottlenecks
Set budgets and create thresholds for cost and performance management
Balance cost versus performance to optimize your Azure subscription

Key Takeaways

Optimization in Azure includes both cost and performance management.
Cloud cost management helps administrators track the costs of implementing cloud solutions and identify opportunities for cost savings.
Tags can be used to identify resources used by specific solutions and provide a comprehensive cost for an entire solution.
Administrators can create thresholds and alerts to be notified when budgets are exceeded or performance drops below acceptable thresholds.
Alerts can send text messages or emails to administrators, run remediation scripts, and create tickets in an existing help desk system.

Frequently Asked Questions

What will I learn in this course?

You will learn how to optimize your Azure subscription, including balancing cost versus performance to deliver adequate services within a predicted budget. This covers viewing your monthly bill, using tags to identify resources, tracking resource metrics, and setting up alerts for performance bottlenecks.

What topics does this course cover?

The course covers analyzing Azure costs and tagging, analyzing performance metrics and service management, and setting budgets and alerts.

How can alerts be used in Azure cost and performance management?

Alerts notify you when budgets are exceeded or performance drops below acceptable thresholds. They can send text messages or emails to administrators, run remediation scripts, and create tickets in an existing help desk system.

What skills does this course help build?

This course relates to skills including Azure Automation, Azure Cost Management, Microsoft Azure, and SQL Azure, and aligns with the Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate and Azure Fundamentals certifications.

Who is this course for?

It is aimed at administrators who manage Azure subscriptions and need to track cloud costs and resource performance to deliver services within a predicted budget.