Azure DevOps Bits and Bobs: #1 - How to update PATH environment variable

This is the first post of a blog post series which I have proclaimed as Azure DevOps Bits and Bobs, where I will share randomly chosen but still useful and good-to-know functions in Azure DevOps. Today we will take a look at the best way to update PATH environment variable on a build agent, as well as get an overview of other logging commands are available to us in Azure DevOps. ...

February 16, 2025 路 3 min 路 Kristina Devochko

Azure Private DNS zone fallback to internet - what, why and how

Towards the end of 2024 Microsoft announced new configuration opportunity for Azure Private DNS zones called fallback to Internet. I think that it was announced more or less right after the 2024 Microsoft Ignite event. This functionality is, at the point of writing this blog post still in preview so proceed with caution 馃樇 I鈥檝e started working with it shortly after it was released, and I would like to share some thoughts and use cases here where utilizing this functionality can make sense, as well as demonstrate how you can implement it yourself. ...

January 15, 2025 路 8 min 路 Kristina Devochko

How to automate migration of classic Application Insights instances to workspace-based

Following the retirement of classic Application Insights in February 2024 I think that it鈥檚 a great opportunity to share a quick tip on how you can easily automate migration of all of your classic instances to workspace-based Application Insights. There鈥檚 a pretty detailed article available as part of Microsoft documentation that walks you through the advantages of workspace-based Application Insights, differences with the classic type and how the table structure differs between those two types. I will not cover it in much detail in this blog post, but I would encourage you to check out the article for more information on the topic: Migrate to workspace-based Application Insights resources. ...

March 12, 2024 路 3 min 路 Kristina Devochko

Resilience testing of Azure services with Azure Chaos Studio

This blog post is a contribution to Azure Back to School - an annual community event taking place in September. For the Community by the Community, during the whole month of September, contributors share their knowledge and experience about Azure. You鈥檙e welcome to check out all the contributions here: 2023 Azure Back to School Session Schedule Introduction Chaos engineering has been known to the tech industry for quite many years now, but it has gained significant popularity and wider adoption during the last few years. There are good reasons for why this acceleration has happened. If we take a look at a modern software development landscape we will see that we鈥檙e steadily building more complex, distributed systems and applications, with hundreds or even thousands of dependencies and interconnections. Ensuring that all of these bits and pieces play nicely together to provide availability, stability and security of our systems at all times is a challenge that鈥檚 not for the faint-hearted. ...

September 21, 2023 路 10 min 路 Kristina Devochko

How to get all Azure Policy assignments of a specific category?

I鈥檝e been in quite a pickle recently: I needed to find out how many and what Azure Policy definitions from Guest Configuration category are currently assigned to my subscription, so that I could understand if any of those policies are applicable to Azure Arc-enabled servers that are residing in the same subscription. Why? Well, because Guest Configuration is a billed functionality, when it comes to Azure Arc. In this case it鈥檚 good to get an overview if any policies related to the billed functionality are enabled in order to further evaluate if you want to use this functionality or not (and therefore disable it to avoid undesired billing). You may also have different use cases for why you would want to retrieve the same information from Azure Policy馃 ...

June 26, 2023 路 2 min 路 Kristina Devochko