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OMS portal moving to Azure

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Note

This article applies to both the Azure public cloud and government cloud except where noted otherwise.

The OMS portal for the Azure public cloud has been officially retired. The OMS portal for Azure US Government cloud was officially retired on May 15, 2019. We are excited to move to the Azure portal and expect the transition to be easy. But we understand changes are difficult and can be disruptive. The rest of this article goes over the key scenarios and the roadmap for this transition.

The Azure portal is the hub for all Azure services and offers a rich management experience with capabilities such as dashboards for pinning resources, intelligent search for finding resources, and tagging for resource management. To consolidate and streamline the monitoring and management workflow, we started adding the OMS portal capabilities into the Azure portal. All of the features of the OMS portal are now part of the Azure portal. In fact, some of the new features such as Traffic Analytics are only available in the Azure portal. You will be able to accomplish everything you were doing in the OMS portal with the Azure portal and more. If you haven’t already done so, you should start using the Azure portal today!

What is changing?

The following changes are being announced with the deprecation of the OMS portal. Each of these changes is described in more detail in the sections below.

What should I do now?

While most features will continue to work without performing any migration, you do need to perform the following tasks:

Refer to Common questions for transition from OMS portal to Azure portal for Log Analytics users for information about how to transition to the Azure portal.

User access and role migration

Azure portal access management is richer and more powerful than the access management in the OMS Portal. See Designing your Azure Monitor Logs workspace for details of access management in Log Analytics.

Note

Previous versions of this article stated that the permissions would automatically be converted from the OMS portal to the Azure portal. This automatic conversion is no longer planned, and you must perform the conversion yourself.

You may already have appropriate access in the Azure portal in which case you don't need to make any changes. There are a couple of cases where you may not have appropriate access in which case your administrator must assign you permissions.

  • You have ReadOnly User permissions in the OMS portal but no permissions in the Azure portal.
  • You have Contributor permissions in the OMS portal but only Reader access in the Azure portal.

In both of these cases, your administrator needs to manually assign you the appropriate role from the following table. We recommend that you assign this role at the resource group or subscription level. More prescriptive guidance will be provided shortly for both these cases.

OMS portal permission Azure Role
ReadOnly Log Analytics Reader
Contributor Log Analytics Contributor
Administrator Owner

New workspaces

You are no longer be able to create new workspaces using the OMS portal. Follow the guidance in Create a Log Analytics workspace in the Azure portal to create a new workspace in the Azure portal.

Changes to alerts

Alert extension

Alerts have been extended into the Azure portal Existing alerts will continue to be listed in the OMS portal, but you can only manage them in Azure portal. If you access alerts programmatically by using the Log Analytics Alert REST API or Log Analytics Alert Resource Template, you'll need to use action groups instead of actions in your API calls, Azure Resource Manager templates, and PowerShell commands.

Alert management solution

As a change from a previous announcement, the Alert management solution will continue to be available and fully supported in the Azure portal. You can continue to install the solution from Azure Marketplace.

While the Alert management solution continues to be available, we encourage you to use Azure Monitor's unified alerting interface to visualize and manage all alerts in Azure. This new experience natively aggregates alerts from multiple sources within Azure including log alerts from Log Analytics. If you are using Azure Monitor’s unified alerting interface, then the Alert management solution is only required to enable integration of alerts from System Center Operation Manager to Azure. In Azure Monitor’s unified alerting interface, you can see distributions of your alerts, take advantage of automated grouping of related alerts via smart groups, and view alerts across multiple subscriptions while applying rich filters. Future advancements in alert management will primarily be available from this new experience.

The data collected by the Alert management solution (records with a type of Alert) continues to be in Log Analytics as long as the solution is installed for the workspace.

OMS Mobile App

The OMS mobile app will be sunsetted along with the OMS portal. Instead of the OMS mobile app, to access information about your IT infrastructure, dashboards and saved queries, you can access the Azure portal directly from your browser in your mobile device. To get alerts, you should configure Azure Action Groups to receive notifications in the form of SMS or a voice call

Application Insights Connector and solution

Application Insights Connector provides a way to include Application Insights data into a Log Analytics workspace. This data duplication was required to enable visibility across infrastructure and application data. With Application Insights extended data retention support in March, 2019 and the ability to perform cross-resource queries in addition to being able to view multiple Azure Monitor Application Insights resources, there is no need to duplicate data from your Application Insights resources and send it to Log Analytics. Furthermore, the Connector sends a subset of the applications properties to Log Analytics, while the cross-resource queries gives you enhanced flexibility.

As such, Application Insights Connector was deprecated and removed from Azure Marketplace along with OMS portal deprecation on March 30, 2019. Existing connections will continue to work until June 30, 2019. With OMS portal deprecation, there is no way to configure and remove existing connections from the portal. This will be supported using the REST API that will be made available in January, 2019 and a notification will be posted on Azure updates.

Azure Network Security Group Analytics

The Azure Network Security Group Analytics solution will be replaced with the recently launched Traffic Analytics which provides visibility into user and application activity on cloud networks. Traffic Analytics helps you audit your organization's network activity, secure applications and data, optimize workload performance and stay compliant.

This solution analyzes NSG Flow logs and provides insights into the following.

  • Traffic flows across your networks between Azure and Internet, public cloud regions, VNETs, and subnets.
  • Applications and protocols on your network, without the need for sniffers or dedicated flow collection appliances.
  • Top talkers, chatty applications, VM conversations in the cloud, traffic hotspots.
  • Sources and destinations of traffic across VNETs, inter-relationships between critical business services and applications.
  • Security including malicious traffic, ports open to the Internet, applications or VMs attempting Internet access.
  • Capacity utilization, which helps you eliminate issues of over provisioning or underutilization.

You can continue to rely on Diagnostics Settings to send NSG logs to Log Analytics so your existing saved searches, alerts, dashboards will continue to work. Customers who have already installed the solution can continue to use it until further notice. Starting September 5, the Network Security Group Analytics solution will be removed from the marketplace and made available through the community as a Azure Quickstart Template.

System Center Operations Manager

If you've connected your Operations Manager management group to Log Analytics, then it will continue to work with no changes. For new connections though, you must follow the guidance in Microsoft System Center Operations Manager Management Pack to configure Operations Management Suite.

Next steps