Azure

Application Insights is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for developers and DevOps professionals. Use it to monitor your live applications. It will automatically detect performance anomalies, and includes powerful analytics tools to help you diagnose issues and to understand what users actually do with your app. It's designed to help you continuously improve performance and usability. It works for apps on a wide variety of platforms including .NET, Node.js and Java EE, hosted on-premises, hybrid, or any public cloud.

Below I list some services provided by Application Insights:

• HTTP request rates, response times, and success rates
• Dependency (HTTP & SQL) call rates, response times, and success rates
• Exception traces from both server and client
• Diagnostic log traces
• Page view counts, user and session counts, browser load times, and exceptions
• AJAX call rates, response times, and success rates
• Server performance counters
• Custom client and server telemetry
• Segmentation by client location, browser version, OS version, server instance, custom dimensions, and more
• Availability tests

Along with the preceding, there are associated diagnostic and analytics tools available for alerting and monitoring with various different customizable metrics. Application Insights is an excellent tool for any cloud service with its own query language and customizable dashboards.

The following diagram gives a high-level view of Azure Monitor. At the center of the diagram are the data stores for metrics and logs, which are the two fundamental types of data used by Azure Monitor. On the left are the sources of monitoring data that populate these data stores. On the right are the different functions that Azure Monitor performs with this collected data. This includes such actions as analysis, alerting, and streaming to external systems.

To use Application Insights, you either install a small instrumentation package (SDK) in your app, or enable Application Insights by using the Application Insights agent. For languages and platforms that support the Application Insights agent, see Supported languages.

You can instrument the web app, any background components, and the JavaScript in the web pages themselves. The app and its components don't have to be hosted in Azure.

Today we are releasing the ability to encrypt storage account with customer-managed keys (CMK) using an Azure Key Vault hosted on a different Azure Active Directory tenant. You can use this solution to encrypt your customers’ data using an encryption key managed by your customers.  

Source: Generally available: Encrypt storage account with cross-tenant customer-managed keys

How to stay up-to-date with Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is huge and changes fast! At this point in time, there are more than 200 services in Azure, with many, many features. The rate at which services evolve is amazing. New services come out all the time, and services are constantly being improved with new features. Microsoft is able to do this because most services are owned by separate teams that develop functionality.

This high rate of change is great because it keeps providing new ways to solve problems. However, it is very hard to stay up-to-date. It is very hard to keep track of new services; and what their purpose is in the world of Azure.
So the question is how to stay up-to-date? Here are some important information sources:
- Azure Friday | Microsoft Docs
- Azure This Week - A Cloud Guru
- Azure updates | Microsoft Azure
- Announcements | Azure Blog and Updates | Microsoft Azure
- Azure Blog and Updates | Microsoft Azure
- Azure App Service Team Blog
And also, the Azure Developer's Cheat Sheet at GitHub - milanm/azure-cheat-sheet: Azure Cheat Sheet

Azure Services map with workload type

See details at Azure Solution Architect Map.pdf · GitHub

Source app settings from key vault

Complete reference:

@Microsoft.KeyVault(SecretUri=https://myvault.vault.azure.net/secrets/mysecret/)

Alternatively:

@Microsoft.KeyVault(VaultName=myvault;SecretName=mysecret)

Source: Use Key Vault references - Azure App Service | Microsoft Learn

Are you just starting your cloud journey or looking for ways to upgrade your knowledge in specific areas? Azure Charts is a web-based application that allows you to see what Azure consists of and how it evolves. 

References

• Azure Charts
• Azure Charts Visualize your cloud learning journey - Microsoft Community Hub

In a recent conversation between the CEOs of Microsoft and OpenAI, it was revealed by Sam Altman that ChatGPT-5 is expected to receive significant updates to its speech, images, and eventually video capabilities.

On his “Unconfuse Me” podcast, Bill Gates, along with Altman, explored the future of artificial intelligence, including its improved reasoning ability and general reliability. “Multimodality will be important,” Altman said, hinting at a future where artificial intelligence (AI) can perform increasingly complex tasks and potentially reshape various sectors, including programming, healthcare, and education.

Anticipation is building for the next iteration of ChatGPT, known as GPT-5. This advanced large language model is seen as a crucial milestone on the path to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), enabling machines to mimic human thought processes.

Read more at ChatGPT-5: release date, price, and what we know so far - ReadWrite

This is an exciting time for AI. New advances in the field have the potential to make AI more helpful for billions of people over the coming years. Since introducing Gemini 1.0, we’ve been testing, refining, and enhancing its capabilities.

Gemini 1.5 delivers dramatically enhanced performance. It represents a step change in our approach, building upon research and engineering innovations across nearly every part of our foundation model development and infrastructure. This includes making Gemini 1.5 more efficient to train and serve, with a new Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture.

Read more at Introducing Gemini 1.5, Google's next-generation AI model (blog.google)