Deployment and monitoring

January 14, 2026 · in AZ-900 (Dion Training)

Management surfaces

The Azure Portal is the browser GUI at portal.azure.com: dashboards, Activity Log, quickstart templates. Manual by nature, and the wrong answer for automation at scale.

Cloud Shell is a browser terminal (shell.azure.com or the portal button), pre-authenticated, with 5 GB persistent storage, a built-in Monaco editor, and a 20-minute idle timeout.

Azure CLI is az commands, cross-platform, Bash-friendly. Azure PowerShell is cmdlets like New-AzResourceGroup, Windows-admin-friendly. Both fully capable; pick by background.

Azure Arc

Arc projects non-Azure resources into Azure management: on-prem and other-cloud servers, Kubernetes clusters, SQL Servers, data services.

Once onboarded they appear in the portal like native resources: Azure Policy, RBAC, Monitor, and Defender all apply. One control plane for hybrid.

Infrastructure as Code

Declare the desired state in files, deploy repeatably, and version-control everything. All of it flows through ARM.

ARM templates are JSON: powerful, verbose. Bicep is the cleaner language compiling to ARM JSON. Both are declarative and idempotent.

Terraform goes cross-cloud with HCL and still uses ARM under the hood on Azure.

Wire it into Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions for deploy-on-push automation.

Azure Advisor

Free personalized recommendations in five categories: performance, security, reliability, cost (with estimated savings amounts), operational excellence. Built from your telemetry vs Microsoft best practices.

Health visibility, three altitudes

Azure Status Page (status.azure.com): global, public, every service in every region.
Service Health: personalized to your subscriptions and regions: incidents, planned maintenance, advisories. 90-day history, alertable.
Resource Health: one resource. Platform issue vs user-initiated vs misconfiguration.

Azure Monitor

The telemetry platform for Azure plus hybrid (agents or Arc). Two data shapes: metrics (numbers over time, dashboards) and logs (rich events, troubleshooting).

Activity Log: who did what, 90-day retention, the control-plane audit trail.
Application Insights: APM for response times, failure rates, usage.
Log Analytics: store and query logs with KQL.

Alerts fire on metric or log conditions and can trigger email, SMS, webhooks, Functions, and Logic Apps via Action Groups.