Insights
Advanced Engineering
Configuration, troubleshooting and trade-offs for infrastructure engineers and specialists.
6 articles
-
Designing a read-only PowerShell toolkit for tenant auditsAdvanced Engineering
An audit script that can change the tenant it's reading is a liability. Here's how to design a Microsoft Graph PowerShell toolkit that can only read, and how to show afterwards that it did.
-
Recovering when identity is what failed: Active Directory and Entra ID recovery planningAdvanced Engineering
Restoring a server is routine. Restoring the directory that decides who can sign in to everything else is not. Here's what Microsoft's guidance says a forest recovery and an Entra ID recovery involve, and where your own design decides the outcome.
-
SQL Server performance problems that are really infrastructure problemsAdvanced Engineering
When a SQL Server workload is slow, the database team points at the disk and the storage team points at the query. Wait statistics, file latency and OS counters, read as deltas against a baseline, show which layer owns the delay.
-
Two-site high availability: the failures a second site does not coverAdvanced Engineering
Buying a second site duplicates your components, but not what both sites depend on, and with only two of them nobody can break a tie. Here's where two-site designs really fail, with the timing and quorum arithmetic and a test plan.
-
Azure Data Factory in practice: where a pipeline runs and what it can reachAdvanced Engineering
A failed copy activity rarely says which machine tried to connect. This is how Data Factory's integration runtimes, managed networking, Private Link and credentials decide what a pipeline can reach, and how to find the failing hop.
-
Moving admin scripts from AzureAD and MSOnline to Microsoft Graph PowerShellAdvanced Engineering
The AzureAD and MSOnline modules were both planned for deprecation on 30 March 2024. Here's how to inventory a script estate, map it to Microsoft Graph PowerShell by permission and endpoint, and test before you switch.