Dear SCOM community, It's been 8 weeks since we launched the free Business Continuity edition (BCE) of our SCOM dashboarding product, and I’m glad to see that many community members have taken us up on the offer. The early feedback we received was encouraging and heartening, and we are happy to have helped ease the pressure on IT teams during these uncertain times, in however small a way.

If you’re reading this article, chances are you’re about to start moving into Azure and want to get your cost control right from the start, or you’re already on your journey and are running into problems getting a clear view of where you’re spending your money. Moving into Azure, or any other cloud, brings with it a new set of challenges that you just don’t face on-prem, and the big one is that pretty much everything incurs its own running cost.

We are delighted to announce the latest versions of our Azure and SCOM products. In this blog I’ll share the highlights of what’s new, including an update to Open Access which is now available in both Light and Dark themes! This unprecedented time has changed our ways of working at SquaredUp. Everyone has settled into the rigors of working from home and our Product Engineering teams have done an outstanding job with version 4.6.

With more and more businesses moving into the cloud, many of us are increasingly faced with the need to monitor our Azure applications in Azure Monitor – but where to start? If you’re feeling lost or overwhelmed by the platform’s sheer range of functionality, you’re not alone, and we’ve got some useful resources for you.

This week, we are glad to have with us IT Consultant and knowledge-sharing enthusiast Bert Pinoy. Here, Bert shows us how to integrate SquaredUp with external APIs, using the example of the MP he created, Uptimerobot Management Pack.

We are delighted to have a guest blog from Cameron Fuller, System Center MVP for Cloud and Datacenter Management, Solution Director for Catapult Systems and automation evangelist. Today, Cameron shares how we can visualize free disk space in Azure using Microsoft tools and third party solutions. Scroll down to final section to see what he's got to say about SquaredUp!

Now that we’ve talked a lot about how to monitor your Azure resources, let’s talk about how to monitor Azure itself. As the classic statement goes, “there is no cloud – it’s just someone else’s computer” – and all computers can go down. Even Microsoft’s. So how do you know when poor availability or performance of your resources is actually a result of Azure itself being sick?

Now that you've learned your way around Log Analytics and Application Insights, let’s move on to discuss how you can set up alerting in Azure Monitor. Azure Monitor is the centralized console where you can create alerting around various resources in your subscription and also manage it.

Over the last few days, most of us have been getting to grips with this new, albeit temporary, norm of remote working. At SquaredUp, we’ve always been able to work like this as all of the tools we use day-to-day are SaaS products or hosted in Azure, but while we’ve always had the right tools, we’ve never actually had to experience everyone being out of the office at the same time.

In my last post I walked through a brief introduction to Application Insights, and APM tools in general, and hopefully the simple outside-in availability test I concluded the chapter with has been a useful starting point for you on your APM journey. In this post, I’m going to dig deeper into Application Insights and walk you through a use case that should make the purpose of Application Insights really clear.