Building an Azure “Super-Assistant” with Azure MCP (Preview)

Introduction

AI assistants for Azure are everywhere right now. Most of them fall into one of two categories:

  • Chatbots with documentation knowledge, but no access to your environment
  • ChatGPT + Azure CLI wrappers, which still require credentials, tokens, and a lot of trust

I wanted to explore something different:

Can we build a genuinely useful Azure assistant that can see my environment, query real data, and still be safe by design?

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Azure Health Check – A Free Script to Audit and Visualise Cloud Hygiene

Are you running Azure subscriptions and want a quick, human-friendly overview of your governance, compute, storage, network and Key Vault hygiene?
The Azure Health Check PowerShell script gives you exactly that — scanning multiple subscriptions, flagging weak spots, and producing a clean interactive HTML report (with charts!).

Why this matters

Large and growing Azure estates can easily drift into insecure or unsupported configurations: unprotected VMs, public storage blobs, missing resource locks, orphaned disks, exposed network ports — all of which can lead to security, availability or compliance issues.

Yet manually auditing each subscription is time-consuming. That’s where automation helps. With this script, you get a multi-subscription health summary, scored, visualised and exportable — ideal for periodic reviews, customer readiness checks, or even compliance audits.

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I Became a Microsoft MVP — A Personal Milestone in My Azure Journey

Today, I want to share something very special and meaningful for me — I have been recognised as a Microsoft MVP in Azure Compute Infrastructure.

For those who don’t know, the Microsoft MVP programme recognises people who contribute to the technical community through knowledge-sharing, guidance, content creation, support, mentoring, and helping others grow.

This became part of who I am many years ago.

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Azure Private Link Service Direct Connect – Simplified Private Connectivity (Public Preview)

Azure Private Link Service (PLS) has long been the go-to option for exposing your services privately to consumers across Azure — ensuring that traffic never crosses the public internet.
Until recently, this required a Standard Load Balancer to sit in front of your service. That setup worked well, but it added complexity and limited flexibility, especially in hybrid or custom routing scenarios.
Now, with Private Link Service Direct Connect, Microsoft has simplified the model. You can route traffic directly to any privately routable IP address, removing the dependency on load balancers altogether.
This new feature opens the door to several use cases — from simplifying secure hybrid connections to enabling private access to third-party SaaS and appliances.

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Automating a Monthly Azure Update Compliance Report with Logic Apps + Azure Resource Graph

Most patching dashboards are great for interactive views—but what if your stakeholders want a scheduled email that shows the current patch compliance for only a scoped set of servers (for example, those tagged for patch governance)? That’s where a small, reliable custom report shines.

In this post I’ll walk through the exact solution I built: a Logic App that queries Azure Update Manager data via Azure Resource Graph (ARG), filters to VMs tagged Monthly_Patch : yes, formats the results into a clean HTML email, and sends it on a monthly cadence.

Why a custom report?

  • No native email report: Azure Update Manager provides blades and workbooks, but not a ready-to-send, nicely formatted email.
  • Audience-specific scoping: We only want to report on VMs with a specific business tag (Monthly_Patch : yes).
  • Consistent sorting & formatting: Stakeholders wanted alphabetical order, readable timestamps, color-coded rows, and centered table content.
  • Lightweight & fast: With ARG we can query Update Manager resources directly—no Log Analytics workspace required for this report.

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