In a previous post, I discussed how to setup a Windows EC2 instance to monitor disk space usage with CloudWatch. Another key attribute to monitor is memory usage. Memory usage, just like disk space, is a performance monitor in Windows. When examining the available performance counters available within Windows, the best counter for our objective … Continue reading Monitoring Memory Usage on a Windows EC2 Instance with CloudWatch
By default, CloudWatch has some native monitoring for EC2 instances (CPUUtilization, NetworkIn/Out, DiskWriteBytes/DiskReadBytes, etc). However, a few key parameters are missing by default- one of which is free disk space. Free disk space requires a custom CloudWatch monitor. Let's go through how to set that up. In the example below, we have a Server 2016 … Continue reading Monitoring Free Disk Space on a Windows EC2 Instance with CloudWatch
A while back I covered Stretching a disk in AWS EC2. Let's take a look at how it's done in Azure (Spoiler: it's also quite simple). For our example, we'll be increasing the size of a Server 2016 OS managed disk from 30GB to 40GB. First, we'll need to stop the VM. Now, AWS currently … Continue reading Stretching a disk in Azure
Like so many others, I'm managing fewer and fewer physical Windows boxes these days. On these physical machines, remote console access via iDracs or iLOs can be super handy. I recently had a situation on a Dell server where the iDrac password on file wasn't working. It would be pretty inconvenient to travel to the … Continue reading Resetting the iDrac Password on a Physical Windows Server
AWS' managed relational database service, RDS, can be a good option for many deployments. One thing you'll find that different when working with RDS is that you won't find the normal Tasks > Back Up... option available for a given database. This is because the service doesn't allow direct disk access to the instance(s) running you … Continue reading Backing up an AWS RDS MSSQL Database to a S3 Bucket
I needed to setup a VPN between an on-prem SonicWall and Azure, but found the documentation on Sonicwall.com here a bit dated. Here's some updated documentation for how to configure the tunnel to supplement the link above. Let's setup the Azure side first: Setup a Virtual Network. If you don't already have a virtual network … Continue reading Setting up a VPN between Azure and on-prem SonicWall
Send-MailMessage may be one of my favorite Powershell cmdlets these days. As I'm sure you've guessed, it's used for sending email- plain and simple. While this can't be said for all cmdlets, the syntax is very intuitive and straightforward. Here's an example: You'll find a bunch of other optional parameters here. I've made use of this … Continue reading The Send-MailMessage Cmdlet
So many corporate applications still require very traditional architectures- servers with specified roles, running all the time. These applications, as written, can't leverage a cloud-native architecture (serverless, etc). For these traditional applications, Azure Virtual Machines and AWS EC2 can be a reasonable fit. Server backups are one part of the discussion for bringing traditional applications … Continue reading Backups for Windows Servers in the Cloud: A Comparison of Azure Virtual Machines and AWS EC2.
