Our own Senior Infrastructure Engineer Daniel Suenkel recently hosted a Breakfast and Learn to share his knowledge and passion for Azure OMS with his AIS colleagues. Continuing with his theme, he explained why Azure OMS truly is the “One Tool to Rule Them All!”

In addition to the material that he provided in his previous blog (Azure OMS: One Tool To Rule Them All), he provided a deeper dive into what Azure OMS is and exactlywhat is offered in each service. Continue reading to find out why Azure OMS continues to be the “One Tool To Rule Them All”…

What is OMS?

Azure OMS is a group of services that utilize the power of Azure Log Analytics and provides you with a holistic view of your entire enterprise in one solution.

1. The Azure OMS portal gives your IT organization the ability to monitor and manage your enterprise from the cloud down rather than from your datacenter up utilizing out of the box and custom dashboards.
2. Provides the ability to automate builds and server configurations which will decrease costs while increasing efficiency.
3. The need for building out large infrastructure is eliminated, as alerts and monitoring can scale and descale environments based on load rather than having systems underutilized but costing your enterprise for maintenance.
4. Utilizing backup and recovery will decrease system and storage costs within your enterprise as everything is in the cloud.
5. Provides accessibility for your IT support team through computers, tablets, and even smartphones!

Enterprise IT Problem #1: Many Enterprises have separate environments and many separate tools to monitor and manage.

Problem solved! Azure OMS provides capabilities to manage and monitor all of your environments from one tool, in the cloud, independent of your other environments at a lower cost. See the table below for the tools that Azure OMS can supplement or replace:

Azure OMS Insight and Analytics

• Built on the Log Analytics platform, a hyper-scale and hybrid service.
• Enables you to collect, correlate, and visualize any data in rich dashboards, dependency maps, and diagnostic views.
• The Service Map service allows for automatic discovery and mapping for application, server, and process dependencies in real-time, without any predefinition required.
• Network Performance Monitor provides near real-time monitoring and troubleshooting of network performance issues like loss, latency and fault localization.
• Quickly diagnose the root cause of an issue across your entire enterprise stack using real-time log search.
• Automatically discover your applications and their dependencies across your increasingly complex IT infrastructure.
• Proactively detect anomalies or previously unknown critical states across your applications, VMs, and network before failures occur.
• Identify application and network connectivity issues, across hybrid environments proactively to alleviate degradation of user experience.
• Monitor and alert on key metrics and KPIs in real-time to rapidly identify problems
• Reduce support costs by exposing configuration and operational issues before they affect your business

Enterprise IT Problem #2: Enterprises have many tools to monitor their platforms and applications for security and network vulnerability.

Problem solved! Here’s what Azure OMS can do…

Azure OMS Automation and Control

• Deliver unified capabilities to deploy, configure, and maintain your infrastructure and applications in Azure or any other cloud, including on-premises, across Windows Server and Linux.
• Integrate process automation and configuration for automated delivery of services using PowerShell or graphical authoring.
• Combine change tracking with configuration management to identify and apply desired configurations and enable compliance.
• Ability to manage all automation and configuration assets from a centralized repository with granular access control.
• Retain control of when and how to patch IaaS and PaaS solutions without unplanned downtime and with application owner’s approval.
• Apply and monitor configurations using a highly available pull service, choose to fix configuration drift without manual intervention.
• Resolve alerts and orchestrate backup and disaster recovery with automated remediation scripts and recovery plans.
• Run automated processes from Azure or locally from an on-premise datacenter with hybrid runbook workers.

Enterprise IT Problem #3: Each tool sends alerts with no correlation between environments and support teams take longer to resolve manually.

Problem…okay, you probably get it by now.

Azure OMS Security and Audit

• Cloud native, infrastructure-free, security management as a service that provides a holistic view of the security posture of your entire environment.
• Quickly identify issues such as missing security updates, outdated antimalware, vulnerable OS configurations, and unusual access or network activity.
• Enables you to more effectively defend against cyber threats by utilizing advanced security analytics and threat intelligence.
• Reduce investigation time with built-in threat intelligence and rapid search of your security data.
• Identify rogue accounts more efficiently and effectively.
• Use security data and insights to demonstrate compliance and easily generate evidence for auditors.
• Leverage Microsoft Security and third-party intelligence for more accurate threat detection and investigation.
• Threat Map provides a world view of attempted malicious activity within your enterprise solution
• Leverage best practice recommendations and security baselines.

Enterprise IT Problem #4: No tool provides a singular view into your enterprise security vulnerabilities and provides cybersecurity best practice recommendations and resolution through the dashboard.

Well, except for…you guessed it!

Azure OMS Protection and Recovery

• Offers integrated cloud backup and disaster recovery.
• Provides a simple and cost-effective solution to protect enterprise applications and data regardless of location.
• Automate the orderly recovery of services in the event of a site outage at the primary datacenter.
• Reduce cost and increase compliance with efficient and flexible online cloud backup and recovery services.
• Protect workloads, both Windows and Linus, regardless of whether they are running on Hyper-V, VMWare, or physical machines
• Ensure that recovered single and multi-tier applications are in a healthy, operational state with application-consistent replication.
• Leverage Azure as your secondary DR site to dramatically reduce capital and operating expenditures
• Test failover and prepare for downtime by utilizing Azure’s endless compute resources and OMS Site Recovery’s non-disruptive disaster recovery drill technology
• Protect solutions against corruption, either malicious or through human errors.
• Back up remote and branch office files and folders directly to the cloud, eliminating backup and hardware costs.
• Protect remote and branch apps with speedy operational recovery from disk or the cloud
• Best in class protection for Microsoft workloads including SQL, SharePoint, and Exchange

Enterprise IT Problem #5: On-premises backup and archive solutions can be costly based on retention requirements.

What’s the Solution?
With the ever-changing IT landscape, Azure OMS provides the consistency and insight necessary to ensure any IT Enterprise digital transformation is successful and sustainable, which makes it the One Tool To Rule Them All!