When to use what Azure monitoring service

The well-known Scott Hanselman has been producing the recurring Azure Friday series for a long time. Last Friday, Scott interviewed Azure Barry (Barry Luijbregts) about “What to use for monitoring your applications in Azure”. Barry did a great overview about the main monitoring services. See the recording and a kind of summary transcript here. Azure provides a bunch of services for monitoring purposes. So, when you you use what service? To answer that, see the video at What to use for monitoring your applications in Azure | Azure Friday. ...

March 7, 2021 · 4 min · Martina Grom
Azure Logic Apps Toolbox 6-Work with items in Apply to each

Azure Logic Apps Toolbox 6-Work with items in Apply to each

Automation of small tasks is helpful for many recurring processes. Unless you regularly use Power Automate (Flow) or Azure Logic Apps, it is often not that easy to remember the correct syntax for accessing items in a loop. Here is the quick help. This sample is using a flow in Power Automate to read messages from a Microsoft Teams team (I know, this sounds strange) and outputs any field to an email. The purpose is just to see how to access data in JSON format in a “Apply to each” loop. Here´s the screenshot of the complete flow with the description of the actions. ...

March 6, 2021 · 3 min · Toni Pohl
Working with Azure AD schema extensions in Graph PowerShell

Working with Azure AD schema extensions in Graph PowerShell

Schema extensions enable to store extended custom data directly to objects in Azure AD. This article describes how to access data we defined and added in Introducing user schema extensions in Delegate365 with the Microsoft Graph PowerShell module. Prerequisites To work with Microsoft Graph and PowerShell, we need to install the Microsoft.Graph module as described at Install the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. You can install the module in PowerShell Core or Windows PowerShell using the following command. ...

March 4, 2021 · 7 min · Toni Pohl
Use multiple Node.js versions on your computer and develop a SPFx webpart

Use multiple Node.js versions on your computer and develop a SPFx webpart

As developer, it often makes sense to have multiple versions of a framework installed on a single computer. For example, when developing SPFx applications with Node,js v10.x and developing web applications using Angular and Node.js v14.x you need both versions. Thankfully, with Node Version Manager, we can. To dive directly into the commonly used Node.js versions: SPFx apps require Node.js LTS 10.x, see Set up your SharePoint Framework development environment. All other versions of Node.js are not supported with SharePoint Framework development. ...

January 23, 2021 · 4 min · Toni Pohl
Azure Logic Apps Toolbox 5-Custom JSON payloads

Azure Logic Apps Toolbox 5-Custom JSON payloads

Did you ever have the problem of pushing different JSON payloads to a logic app and hitting errors due to JSON schema mismatches? The usual HTTP Request forces you to define the JSON Schema at the beginning. For every tiny difference in the later used properties you need to create your own Logic App even if the process is the same. I will show you an example of a single Logic App deciding at runtime which JSON schema to use for decoding the post body payload. Stay tuned! ...

January 14, 2021 · 3 min · Christoph Wilfing
Join the M365 virtual community events

Join the M365 virtual community events

Ready to learn more about Microsoft 365 technology such as Microsoft Graph, SharePoint, Office-AddIns and more? Check out the Microsoft 365 virtual community events! Have fun and get involved!

January 5, 2021 · 1 min · Martina Grom
Working with Azure AD schema extensions and Microsoft Graph

Working with Azure AD schema extensions and Microsoft Graph

Azure Active Directory is Microsoft´s Cloud Identity system that stores user, license, group, apps, device data and more data in a secure way. As developers, we can extend many of these resources with custom extension. This can be useful to store additional metadata, such as a cost center or personal data for a user, for a group or other resource types. Unfortunately, there isn’t much documentation on that. Here’s how to do this step-by-step for the user resource with Azure AD schema extensions in real life. ...

December 29, 2020 · 13 min · Toni Pohl
Azure Logic Apps Toolbox 4-Working with SharePoint dropdown fields

Azure Logic Apps Toolbox 4-Working with SharePoint dropdown fields

Yesterday I documented in “Get data from SharePoint as HTML table with Azure Logic Apps” how data is retrieved from SharePoint Online with an Azure Logic app. To dig a little deeper into working with SharePoint list data, here are a few more helpful tips. Query for empty fields (eq null) To find items in an SPO list that have NO value in an Azure Logic App SharePoint Get items action, we can use “<field> eq null” (and not eq ‘’ ). Simple as that, but good to remember. So in our sample, the ODATA filter query is as here: SubscriptionEndDate lt addDays(utcNow(),-30) and Invoice eq null ...

December 18, 2020 · 2 min · Toni Pohl
Azure Logic Apps Toolbox 3-Get data from SharePoint as HTML table

Azure Logic Apps Toolbox 3-Get data from SharePoint as HTML table

Sometimes it´s good to get data from a data source as a table and as quickly as possible in an automated way. While this can be done with multiple ways, here´s a quick solution if you want to get the items from a custom list in SharePoint Online sent as a HTML table in an email with Azure Logic Apps (or Power Automate). In this sample, we assume we have a custom list in a SharePoint Online site that includes some hundred lines of data with license requests and billing information. We want to get specific items that will expire in near future where there´s no invoice set. We will do this with a filtered query. The result shall be formatted as HTML table and sent to an email address. Azure Logic Apps and Power Automate (Flow) is perfect for such a quick task. ...

December 17, 2020 · 4 min · Toni Pohl

Get the new Azure architecture icons v3

Cloud architecture diagrams need to look good. Get the new Azure architecture icons v3 here! Open docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/icons, agree to the terms and download the file Azure_Public_Service_Icons_V3.zip. Check out the pretty new Azure icons for your cloud diagrams!

November 30, 2020 · 1 min · Toni Pohl