Thoughts on ALM, Azure, and Agile by Walter Myers III

The wait is finally over. This is a huge update to the Azure Management Pack over the one that was released a couple of years ago, which not only monitors Azure applications but storage and virtual machines as well.  You can download the new management...

I’m posting this by request from a customer who desires to setup an alert when a hosted service changes its state. The process is fairly straightforward, provided you know where to look. In the screenshot below, we have a hosted service (in my case, eponymously...

Monitors are powerful management pack objects in SCOM. In the Operations Manager documentation, a monitor is described in the following manner: “monitors can be used to assess various conditions that can occur in monitored objects. For example, a monitor...

In corporate environments, sometimes a SCOM administrator is given access to the Operations Console only through installation on a client machine or through a Citrix session. So they can’t just launch the Event Viewer in order to take a look at the Operations...

In my previous post , I showed you how to visualize Windows Azure Event logs in SCOM 2007 R2. I would like to extend this post to add on some of my additional learning of dealing with Event logs, and Trace logs as well. First, I want to show how to split...

In this blog, I will demonstrate how to visualize event logs in SCOM 2007 R2. Even though the Windows Azure Management Pack documentation says that the management pack “collects and monitors Windows events,” it doesn’t simply collect them on its own....

Disclaimer: The procedures explained in this document are current as of January 2012, and are subject to change without notice. Of utmost concern to enterprise customers (indeed all customers) who are considering deploying their applications to Windows...

In earlier versions of the Windows Azure SDK, the default Windows Azure Diagnostics string provided by the Visual Studio template in the service configuration file was named DiagnosticsConnectionString . Later Windows Azure SDKs have changed this name...

Synthetic transactions with SCOM are one way you can automate a set of web requests to test various aspects of your Windows Azure web applications. The SCOM 2007 R2 Operations User Guide defines synthetic transactions in the following manner (I mashed...

Recently, I had a colleague ask me how to groom diagnostic data collected in Windows Azure storage from Windows Azure applications. Since he is using SCOM, there is a ready answer for configuring regular grooming of Windows Azure diagnostic data, thus...

Through rules, SCOM provides a powerful system for capturing specific events from the event log of Windows Azure applications and notifying various groups of critical events through SCOM alerts. Events are stored in the SCOM database, which can be analyzed...

In previous blog posts I demonstrated how to setup your Azure performance counters, how to install SCOM 2007 R2 along with the Windows Azure Management Pack, and how to configure Azure Diagnostics performance counter monitoring in SCOM 2007 R2. In this...

In my last post , I provided a primer on installing SCOM 2007 R2 along with the Azure Management Pack (which is still currently in Release Candidate status). In the post before that, I showed you how to setup the performance counters in your web and worker...

You can find the full procedures in the SCOM 2007 R2 Deployment Guide and Azure Management Pack documentation, but I am providing this to give you visuals with some “hard won” experience that augments those instructions and provides a bit...

For those wondering how to setup performance counters on your web or worker roles when you deploy your Azure applications, wonder no more, as this post will help to get you started. Azure does not automatically setup performance counters for you from...

I recently had a customer migrating an application to Azure whose policy is to send well-formed XML with detailed error information to the event log whenever errors are detected in their applications. The customer was getting errors when including XML...

Okay, there are a lot of things you probably should be doing in TFS 2010 and probably are already doing. But my “Big 3” best practices are things some agile development teams I have worked with should be doing, but they tend to balk at even when I emphasize...

In this short post, I will discuss two models for handling change requests in the MSF Agile 5.0 process template for Team Foundation Server 2010. If you’re wondering “What Change Request?” since out of the box the MSF Agile 5.0 template doesn’t have one...

The Microsoft Test Manager 2010 is a new manual testing tool that integrates fully with Team Foundation Server 2010. This tool is designed for the Test professional, and integrates the management of test plans along with their test cases into the full...

This blog is to introduce you to one three-tier work item strategy we use at Microsoft for tracking requirements and tasks during iterative solution development. It comes in the form of a process template provided as a download in this post that you can...

This blog provides a walkthrough of using the provided workbooks for iterative projects in the TFS 2010 MSF Agile 5.0 process template. First, let’s take a look at the Team Explorer “plug-in” in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE: Next, we’ll go to the SharePoint...

With the considerable uptake of Team Foundation Server 2010, it's time to get some blogs out there that reflect what I have learned over the past few months performing installs and migrations for customers. In general, my first suggestion is that you...

For a long time I have wanted to get around to writing precise instructions on how to modify the out of the box MSF for Agile Software Development and MSF for CMMI Process Improvement process templates with respect to the SharePoint sites they generate...

It’s late on a Sunday night and I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I would crank out a blog post discussing my observations on decomposition of coding tasks with Team Foundation Server (TFS). When I deliver training on TFS 2008, I always offer my commentary...

I ran into a problem doing a split install (separate App Tier and Data Tier) of Team Foundation Server 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2 while running the configuration wizard, allowing the wizard to install SharePoint. It seems if you use a different service...