Azure, the software giant's cloud computing service, is about to get another major update this week. Microsoft has just announced the general availability of Azure Advisor, Azure Resource Health, and Azure Monitor. Microsoft made the big cloud announcement this week.

In a recent statement posted on the Azure blog, the Redmond-based has announced to the world the general availability of Azure Monitor, Azure Advisor, and Azure Resource Health. It also announced the rolled out of the new Azure Relay Hybrid Connections, which said to enable hybrid connectivity to Azure customers.

For a starter, Azure Advisor offers organizations with personalized recommendations and guide them through the best practices to help optimize their Azure resources, while Azure Resources Health inform and alert users about the current and past health status of cloud resources. Azure Resources Health also provides technical support when need help in their cloud issues.

Azure Monitor is the software giant's built-in platform monitoring service for Azure cloud services. This newly introduced service provides all the vital monitoring telemetry and empowers organizations to unlock deeper insights and analytics on top of the telemetry, enabling seamless integration with the customers' preferred cloud monitoring solutions. The new service offers a dashboard capable of displaying real-time information about the Azure customers' cloud resources.

In addition to the Azure Monitor and Azure Advisor, Microsoft also announced that the company's Azure Relay Hybrid Connections service has finally reached General Availability, the InfoQ reported. Microsoft said that the core capability of the Azure Relay Hybrid Connections is to enable hybrid connectivity for the company's Azure customers.

According to Microsoft, the Azure Relay Hybrid Connections will enable customers to securely expose services that reside within a corporate enterprise network to the public cloud, without having to some changes in the corporate network infrastructure. This new Azure cloud service is said to support a variety of different transport protocols and web services standards. For more information about Azure Relay Hybrid Connections, including pricing and availability, check out Microsoft Azure page.

In other Azure-related news, Azure Cloud in Japan has suffered a failure last Friday, March 31. On a recent post-Azure status page, Microsoft revealed suspected causes of the Azure Japan outage, It said that a failed UPS (uninterrupted power supply) has resulted in the power distribution that feeds all of the cooling systems in Azure Japan East data center to fail.

Some Azure resources were programmed to automatically shut down when it sensed something wrong with the service's cooling system. This was done to avoid overheating and ensure cloud data integrity and resilience. Third party teams and the Azure team have quickly sprung into actions to deal with the issues. Their first move is to restart the cloud's cooling system, using outside airflow to force cool air into the data center, the Data Center Knowledge reported.

Microsoft has already sent reports for analysis. It also issues a general statement, apologizing for any downtime Azure customers may have experienced. This is not the first time Azure Japan has gone to this kind of cloud issue. Recently, Azure Japan users ran into troubles when using the cloud service's virtual machines, due to some technical issue involving a newly built storage scale unit in one data center. Reports said that the Azure team has made a fatal mistake here when it unintentionally assigned IP addresses that should have only been used in another data center facility.

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Tags Microsoft, Azure, Microsoft Azure, Cloud Computing, Cloud, IT, Computing