Microsoft Azure Firewall adds new features like Resource Health and more

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Microsoft is adding some features to Azure Firewall. They include two features that are now accessible in a public preview and one that is generally available for all users of the Azure cloud security service.

In a blog post, Microsoft states that the new feature that's now generally available in Azure Firewall is Latency Probe. This feature is supposed to help admins see the overall latency in the service. It states:

IT administrators can use the metric for monitoring and alerting if there is observable latency and diagnosing if the Azure Firewall is the cause of latency in a network. This troubleshooting metric is helpful for proactively engaging in potential issues to traffic or services in your infrastructure.

Latency in Azure Firewall could be caused by a number of issues, according to Microsoft. They include networking problems, along with high use of CPUs or throughput.

One of the new features that's now available in public preview is the Resource Health section. As the name implies, this feature lets admins see the overall health of their Azure Firewall system. It adds:

Resource Health allows IT teams to receive proactive notifications regarding potential health degradations and recommended mitigation actions for each health event type.

The public preview of Health Resource is enabled automatically in Azure Firewall so admins don't need to activate anything.

Finally, the other new feature in public preview is Embedded Firewall Workbooks. It will allow admins to quickly check out data from Azure Firewall in a "user-friendly format". Microsoft says:

With the Azure Firewall Workbook, you can extract valuable insights from Azure Firewall events, delve into your application and network rules, and examine statistics regarding firewall activities across URLs, ports, and addresses. It enables you to filter your firewalls and resource groups, and effortlessly narrow down data sets based on specific categories when investigating issues in your logs.

The new feature can be enabled by admins by going into Azure Firewall Monitoring in the Azure Portal. They can then click on Logs, Metrics, or Workbooks to check out the new additions.