Juni 2017 - Seite 7 von 190 - Cloud Computing Köln

Do you find yourself scrambling for information when investigating application performance issues? Do you spend hours (sometimes even days) gathering and reporting on usage and incidents of your application to stakeholders?

Azure Application Insights lets you learn, iterate, and improve the performance and usability of your apps and services by providing real-time insights based on machine learning and ad-hoc analytics. It helps you to detect, investigate, and mitigate application performance issues before impacting users.

New features of Azure Application Insights, currently available in public preview, make it easy to collate and report all relevant information. Whether you are investigating an application performance issue or exploring application usage, you can journal the findings and narrate the complete story of your app.

Workbooks for Application Usage Monitoring

Workbooks, a new feature in Application Insights, lets you combine visualizations of usage data, Analytics queries, and text into interactive documents. It helps product owners answer questions about their app usage that span multiple visualization tools – Users, Sessions, Events, Retention, and Analytics – then pull the results together into an easy-to-read form to share with their team. When you send a workbook to someone on your team, the controls and queries you used to make the workbook remain editable to them. This makes workbooks easy to explore, extend, and check for mistakes. Workbooks are available in the Usage section of Application Insights, today.

To learn more, visit the documentation page on how to investigate and share usage data.

Screenshot of Workbooks in Azure Application Insights

User and Session Timeline Visualizations

Analyzing the behaviors of individual users can be illuminating. For example, by watching a customer use your product in-person you can learn where there are usability improvements you need to make. That’s why we’re making it even easier to filter down to individual users and session in Application Insights. In the Users, Sessions, and Events tools, you’ll find sections that give five sample users, sessions, or events, respectively, based on your query. We’re taking this a step further with a new timeline view when you click on sample sessions in the Sessions tool. This timeline makes it easy to browse the details, page views, and custom events of a session like a story. By stepping through a user’s experience in this way, you can infer difficulties or goals they may have had while using your product, then address these in a future release of your site.

Screenshot highlighting Session Timeline in Azure Application Insights

Funnels to understand User Flows

Funnels allow you to easily measure conversions of a sequence of events through visual representation without writing complicated queries. Use Funnels to understand where users are dropping off and pinpoint events or pages that are causing issues for your customers. To learn more, visit the documentation page on usage analysis for web applications.

Screenshot of Funnels in Azure Application Insights

Curated performance investigation improvements

We listened to your feedback and made improvements to application performance investigation experience. The performance blade now includes titles for each chart and grid. It also provides the trends of operational responsiveness and lets you drill into the details on a specific slow operation of interest.

Screenshot of performance investigation in Azure Application Insights

Public preview management

As we continue to innovate and release new features in Application Insights, we want to provide the flexibility and control you need to leverage the new capabilities. In this regard, we have enabled public preview management to land new experiences with minimal disruption to your business operations. Here you can try out new enhancements to Application Insights on your own schedule and test them in your pre-production environments, before moving to production.

To learn more about how to configure previews, see the documentation link on how to preview upcoming changes.

Try out these features today and let us know what you think of them at Application Insights UserVoice.
Quelle: Azure

30. Juni 2017

da Agency

.NET: Manage Azure Container Service, Cosmos DB, Active Directory Graph and more

We released 1.1 of the Azure Management Libraries for .NET. This release adds support for:

Cosmos DB
Azure Container Service and Registry
Active Directory Graph

https://github.com/azure/azure-sdk-for-net/tree/Fluent

Getting started

You can download 1.1 from:

Create a Cosmos DB with DocumentDB API

You can create a Cosmos DB account by using a define() … create() method chain.

var documentDBAccount = azure.DocumentDBAccounts.Define(docDBName)
.WithRegion(Region.USEast)
.WithNewResourceGroup(rgName)
.WithKind(DatabaseAccountKind.GlobalDocumentDB)
.WithSessionConsistency()
.WithWriteReplication(Region.USWest)
.WithReadReplication(Region.USCentral)
.Create();

In addition, you can:

Create Cosmos DB with DocumentDB API and configure for high availability
Create Cosmos DB with DocumentDB API and configure with eventual consistency
Create Cosmos DB with DocumentDB API, configure for high availability and create a firewall to limit access from an approved set of IP addresses
Create Cosmos DB with MongoDB API and get connection string

Create an Azure Container Registry

You can create an Azure Container Registry by using a define() … create() method chain.

var azureRegistry = azure.ContainerRegistries.Define("acrdemo")
.WithRegion(Region.USEast)
.WithNewResourceGroup(rgName)
.WithNewStorageAccount(saName)
.WithRegistryNameAsAdminUser()
.Create();

You can get Azure Container Registry credentials by using ListCredentials().

RegistryListCredentials acrCredentials = azureRegistry.ListCredentials();

Create an Azure Container Service with Kubernetes Orchestration

You can create an Azure Container Service by using a define() … create() method chain.

var azureContainerService = azure.ContainerServices.Define(acsName)
.WithRegion(Region.USEast)
.WithNewResourceGroup(rgName)
.WithKubernetesOrchestration()
.WithServicePrincipal(servicePrincipalClientId, servicePrincipalSecret)
.WithLinux()
.WithRootUsername(rootUserName)
.WithSshKey(sshPublicKey)
.WithMasterNodeCount(ContainerServiceMasterProfileCount.MIN)
.WithMasterLeafDomainLabel("dns-myK8S")
.DefineAgentPool("agentpool")
.WithVMCount(1)
.WithVMSize(ContainerServiceVMSizeTypes.StandardD1V2)
.WithLeafDomainLabel("dns-ap-myK8S")
.Attach()
.Create();

Create Service Principal with Subscription Access

You can create a service principal and assign it to a subscription with contributor role by using a define() … create() method chain.

var servicePrincipal = authenticated.ServicePrincipals.Define("spName")
.WithExistingApplication(activeDirectoryApplication)
// define credentials
.DefinePasswordCredential("ServicePrincipalAzureSample")
.WithPasswordValue("StrongPass!12")
.Attach()
// define certificate credentials
.DefineCertificateCredential("spcert")
.WithAsymmetricX509Certificate()
.WithPublicKey(File.ReadAllBytes(certificate.CerPath))
.WithDuration(TimeSpan.FromDays(7))
// export credentials to a file
.WithAuthFileToExport(new StreamWriter
(new FileStream(authFilePath, FileMode.OpenOrCreate)))
.WithPrivateKeyFile(certificate.PfxPath)
.WithPrivateKeyPassword(certPassword)
.Attach()
.WithNewRoleInSubscription(role, subscriptionId)
.Create();

Similarly, you can:

Manage service principals
Browse graph (users, groups and members) and managing roles
Manage passwords

Try it

You can get more samples from GitHub. Give it a try and let us know what do you think by emailing us or commenting below.
Quelle: Azure

30. Juni 2017

da Agency

The Future Of Health Care Could Be Humans, Robots — Or Both

Minerva Studio / Getty Images

At the well-funded startup Omada Health, its coaches teach patients to prevent diabetes by eating better and exercising. They don’t meet face to face, but communicate over the internet — and the coaches are increasingly aided by a machine learning-powered software that provides cues for interacting with the patients.

Since the San Francisco company was founded in 2011, these coaches were a mix of full- and part-time staffers. But in November, it let go of all the part-timers and it instructed the remaining coaches to rely more on the software, the company told BuzzFeed News.

CEO Sean Duffy insists that his long-term goal isn’t to replace people with software. “The thesis is that we don’t think we’ll ever be at a point in Omada’s trajectory where we’ll ever take people or coaches out of the equation,” he told BuzzFeed News. “But they’ve got really smart systems to help them.”

Like many other tech-enabled health care services that connect patients with experts — coaches, therapists, nurses, doctors — over video chat, email, and text, Omada is trying to navigate a fundamental shift in labor. People are expensive, at least compared to automated, data-driven chatbots that could give advice and diagnose diseases without needing a salary or a college degree. But bots aren’t nearly as good at holding conversations, perceiving emotions and subtext, and delivering sensitive information like, say, a cancer diagnosis. If they want to grow, startups will have to figure out whether their patients and businesses alike will be best served by man, machine, or some blend of the two.

“There’s a spectrum of totally autonomous machine learning and the other side is totally human-driven,” said Mike McCormick, principal at Comet Labs, a venture capital firm that invests in artificial intelligence startups. “And then there’s every shade of gray in the middle of that.”

The previously unreported cuts at Omada last fall were small, and affected 10 to 12 part-time coaches, according to a spokesperson. It has about 60 to 70 full-time coaches and 250 employees overall. In another set of layoffs that Duffy said were unrelated, the startup also laid off roughly 20 workers last week, saying it “had to focus on Omada’s core business and expertise, while orienting the company for long-term success.” Omada has raised $125 million in venture capital, including $50 million this month in a round led by the health insurer Cigna.

“There’s a spectrum of totally autonomous machine learning and the other side is totally human-driven.”

Duffy said that as Omada has treated more patients and collected more of their data, it’s trained an algorithm to detect important behavioral changes. For example, if a person weighed in on a digital scale every day consistently, then stopped weighing in for three days, the system would flag the coach. It’d then “suggest messages they might send to a participant that might result in an outcome” — in this case, to find out how a person is doing and why they’re skipping weigh-ins, Duffy said.

The CEO was quick to note that the machine isn’t prewriting messages down to the word, but suggesting a gist to convey. He also said that users could tell when a nominally human-written message is computer-generated, and that this makes them lose trust in the system, Duffy said.

Coaches can also say no. “If we get enough coaches declining these suggestions and saying, ‘That violated my intuition as a human being,’ it trains the system to get better and better and give better and better suggestions,” he said.

The part-timers had access to this technology, but Duffy said that the company benefited more from having full-timers be constantly involved and invested in improving it.

Omada isn’t the only company exploring how to use artificial intelligence to improve health care. Startups like Babylon Health, HealthTap, and Remedy are developing chatbots to assess patients’ symptoms. Big Health has an entirely automated program called Sleepio, which stars a cartoon professor and is designed to help people with severe insomnia. But these nascent technologies are too new to definitively prove that machines can improve health more than humans can.

To survive, any kind of virtual health service will have to prove that it can get people to sign up, stay involved, and actually improve their health, said Liz Rockett, director of Kaiser Permanente Ventures, which has invested in both Omada and Big Health. “Doing the work of proving efficacy and reach is the best way to define that line of what works and what doesn’t – including on the question of using coaches in the delivery or having an all-virtual offering,” she wrote in an email to BuzzFeed News.

For now, there are way more people-to-people telemedicine services. Ginger.io initially tried to infer behavioral patterns and mental health problems from passively tracked smartphone data, but switched to a text and video-chat model with human therapists.

So in five to 10 years, will patients be more likely to interact with a human or a chatbot when they open up a health app? It’ll largely depend on how high-stakes the situation is, McCormick said. You’d want to hear that you have cancer from a trained expert with an extremely high degree of accuracy and emotional sensitivity. But for, say, nutrition coaching, he said, “maybe people are ready now. …It has to be nuanced.”

Quelle: <a href="The Future Of Health Care Could Be Humans, Robots — Or Both“>BuzzFeed

30. Juni 2017

da Agency

ISVs find their cloud footing on Azure

This post is authored by the ISV team.

According to Gartner, “By 2020, anything other than a cloud-only strategy for new IT initiatives will require justification at more than 30% of large-enterprise organizations.” With innovation shifting to public datacenters, pressure is on ISVs to develop their own cloud roadmap.

Moving to the cloud is a big step, but it might be easier than you think. The Microsoft Azure platform has an array of options that accelerate business transformation. Move to the cloud on your terms, and from there the sky’s the limit.

For example, Baker Hill, a technology solution provider to more than 600 banks and credit unions, needed to move more than 10 terabytes of data from its parent company’s datacenter in just 48 hours without using a transfer agent or touching anything in the originating datacenter. With help from Microsoft, Baker Hill migrated hundreds of databases with time to spare by using Azure ExpressRoute connected to Equinix’s high-speed network. And now that Baker Hill has met its migration deadline, the company is continuing to transform its offerings with Azure.

In another scenario, Brainshark, which provides its clients worldwide with a cloud-based sales readiness and training platform, needed to find a more elastic solution to handle an ever-expanding volume of video content. To eliminate storage and processing constraints, Brainshark moved to Azure. In addition to improving the end-user experience, the transition virtually eliminated maintenance costs. But that was just the first step. Next, the company created Brainshark Labs, an incubator for next-generation sales enablement solutions that include wearable technology, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. For this next chapter of innovation, Brainshark integrated Azure Cognitive Services with HoloLens mixed-reality simulation technology to transform sales training and customer engagement.

These are just two of many success stories with Microsoft technologies. Are you ready to add yours?

Learn more about partnering with Microsoft.
Quelle: Azure