Some background

In September 2023, we officially released Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure, the first offer in the market for Premier Solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI.

Collaboratively built with Microsoft, this new platform extends and optimizes Azure Hybrid Cloud to on-premises, delivering three fundamental benefits:

• Simplifying deployment and operations
• Accelerating application modernization
• Optimizing workload placement

Figure 1. Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure Architecture

The innovation at Dell Technologies never stops. We are constantly developing and improving our products, and we have just launched our first update to the platform. Briefly, this release introduces and enhances:

• New Features:
  • Azure Stack HCI, version 23H2
  • Single-node expansion to a 2-node cluster
  • Convert 2-node switchless storage network cluster to 2-node switched storage
• ACP foundation software improvements:
  • Day 0/1 Operations (Automated cluster deployment up to 16 nodes, JSON file upload, Day 1 RESTful APIs)
  • Day 2 Operations (GUI for drive add/replace, GUI for node repair/replace)
• Integrations:
  • Serviceability (Add ESE/RSC logs to support log bundle collection)
  • Azure Update Manager
  • Event Monitoring for Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure

Check out those updates in greater detail in these blogs: What's New with the Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure March 2024 Release and Dell Technologies First to Deliver Azure Stack HCI 23H2.

In this blog, we want to put the spotlight on one particularly significant, useful, and easy to consume new capability – Event Monitoring for Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure.

Event Monitoring for Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure

Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure seamlessly integrates with Microsoft’s Azure Portal, providing the ability to monitor events generated on both Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure hardware and the Cloud Platform Manager VM.

This new Insights for Azure Stack HCI monitor feature allows our customers to directly visualize in Azure Portal informational event data generated by the multicloud (MC) node hardware and the Cloud Platform Manager VM using an Insights integrated workbook.

With this workbook, we are empowering users to effectively manage and optimize their clusters and, in turn, receive the benefit of accelerated issue detection and time to resolution. I know, we’re excited too.

Enabling Event Monitoring for Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure: Is it difficult?

Not really. Simply follow these steps:

• First, ensure you meet these mandatory prerequisites in your cluster:
  1. Azure Stack HCI, version 23H2 (registered and connected to Azure)
  2. Arc-enabled (Azure Monitor extension installed)
  3. Insights enabled
• Once you have completed the prerequisites, navigate to the Insights page of your cluster in Azure portal and:

Figure 2. Enabling Event Monitoring in Azure portal

1. Select the Event Monitoring for Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure workbook
2. Click Enable selected
3. Click Enable to enable the workbook

Boom. Done. That was easy, and now the workbook is enabled…what is next?

What does Event Monitoring for Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure look like?

Once the page refreshes, you’ll be taken to the first of the two tabs of the workbook – the Overview tab – which provides a brief description of what this workbook is and the information it can provide to its users.

Figure 3. Event Monitoring for Dell APEX Cloud Platform Overview tab

The second tab in the workbook – the Health tab – presents a summary of the alerts or events that have occurred on the cluster, broken down into Warning, Critical, and Informational alerts.

The Health tab also provides a Nodes table with a high-level overview of each node for the selected time range, including which cluster it belongs to, the node name, health status, node state, uptime, and domain.

Figure 4. Event Monitoring for APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure Health tab

A second table – the Alerts table – shows each alert in greater detail, including its corresponding node, component and subcomponent, severity level, event code, product service tag number, reported time, a short description, and even a knowledgebase article for issue diagnosis and troubleshooting guidance.

Note that you can leverage the Search bar to filter the information based on a given search term and the Time Range drop-down menu to show the events that occurred on all the MC nodes for the cluster within a specific time range.

Conclusion

Our workbook, Event Monitoring for Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure, makes real the ability to monitor events generated on both Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure hardware and the Cloud Platform Manager within the Azure Portal.

This powerful integration provides a great deal of value, significantly reducing the issue detection time and time to resolution.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more updates in Info Hub!

Resources

We have tons of great content to help you deep-dive into Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure powered by Dell APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software:

• What's New with the Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure March 2024 Release 
• Dell Technologies First to Deliver Azure Stack HCI 23H2
• YouTube playlist with educational and demo videos 
• NEW YouTube playlist for March 2024 release
• Info Hub white papers, videos, and interactive demos 
• APEX Cloud Platform for Azure main product page 
• Microsoft’s official announcement of 23H2 general availability 
• General availability of Azure Virtual Desktop
• Azure Stack HCI Security Book
• Check out What’s new for Azure edge infrastructure in 2023 for an eye opening case study of a fictional grocery store chain that uses Microsoft Azure to deploy and manage infrastructure at the edge using Azure Arc, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Azure Stack HCI. This is a highly enlightening, end-to-end view of how all the technologies within the Azure hybrid cloud ecosystem can harmoniously work together to solve a real-world business problem in the retail vertical. 

And as always, please reach out to your Dell Technologies account team if you would like to have more in-depth discussions about the Dell APEX Cloud Platforms family. If you don’t currently have a Dell Technologies contact, we’re here to help on our corporate website.

Author: Ignacio Borrero, Senior Principal Engineer, Technical Marketing Dell CI & HCI

@virtualpeli

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