Microsoft have now made Traffic Analytics available to the public!
The public preview for this was announced three months ago and was just released a week ago to the general public. The solution has analysed terabytes of flow logs on a frequently for network activity across virtual subnets, VNets, Azure data centre regions and VPN’s to provide actionable insights that helped customers:
- Audit their networks and root out non-compliant workloads.
- Optimize the placement of customers workloads and improve the user experience.
- Detect security issues and help improve data and application security.
- Reduce customer costs by making sure their deployments are the right size by removing the risk of over-previsioning or not properly utilising their machines.
- Customers can gain more insight and visibility into their subscriptions spanning over multiple regions and subscriptions.
Some of the key improvements of this release are:
- Customer environments – Traffic Analytics provides an insight into all aspects of a customer environment, for example being able to see network locations with VMs but no network activity. This also detects infected flows across application gateways, subnets and networks. This also includes visibility into open ports that converse over the internet and hosts that send traffic to the internet to identify threats.
- Summary View – This provides customers with a summary of allowed and blocked infected flows that span across inbound and outbound traffic.
- Application Activity – This identifies activity within customer workloads including applications that generate/consume the most flows. Customers can also secure their network using the insights from infected and blocked traffic by the application or port.
- Capacity Planning – This allows customers to view the utilisation stats across their gateways and be able to detect gateways that are being under utilised/completely maxed out. These stats can be used to understand patterns in traffic and be able to distribute traffic more efficiently.
- Application Gateway and Load Balancer support – Traffic Analytics now has capabilities to include traffic that flows through Azure Application Gateways and Load Balancers. This feature allows customers to see traffic patterns and traffic distribution to backend pool instances and hosts.
- Secure your cloud network with NSG Insights – Customers can gain more detailed statistics which include the top five NSGs and NSG rules allowing them to answer questions such as ‘How affective are your NSGs?’.
- Automate deployments – Traffic Analytics supports PowerShell version 6.2.1 and above to allow customers to start analysing data in just a couple of minutes.
- More Regions – This feature allows customers to add workspace in regions such as South East Asia.
