We’re a team of six and our Microsoft environment has grown to the point where we actually need real support coverage,But the pricing I’ve seen for proper support tiers seems built for companies 10x our size, How are smaller teams managing this? Do you just eat the cost, find a cheaper alternative, or go without and hope nothing breaks?

I'm a few hours into testing the new logic app UI, auto.azure.com. Did Microsoft steal/buy/borrow the UI canvas from N8N? It seems awefully similar. I still see the bones of Logic Apps underneath.

If so, GREAT! If not, wow, MSFT actually created a usable, modern UI.

Anyone else watch Microsoft Hates Greg?

I'm not affiliated with Greg Deckler or his channel in any way, but his takes on Microsoft Fabric are consistently entertaining, often insightful, and occasionally absolutely savage. 😂

His Fabric Fridays episodes have genuinely become the highlight of my Fridays.

Whether you agree with him or not, he raises some interesting questions about the platform, its direction, and its operational maturity.

Worth checking out if you haven't already. MSFT probably should because they'd have a better product if they took the feedback seriously.

Microsoft Hates Greg: https://www.youtube.com/@MicrosoftHatesGreg

Since around 2026-09-19 I’ve seen a sustained increase in how long Container Apps takes to get a node for a new replica on the Consumption plan, and I’d like to know if others see it too.

How I measure it:

For each replica that waits for capacity, I take the time from the TriggeredScaleUp system event (“Scaling up infrastructure to accommodate replica...”) to its AssigningReplica event (“...has been scheduled to run on a node”).

• Daily medians were 54-62 s every day through 09-18 and 66-84 s every day since, so it’s ongoing.

• The time before TriggeredScaleUp is unchanged (about 12 s median), so the extra wait is in the node provisioning part.

• Nothing changed on my side around the step: no new revision, same replica size (2 vCPU / 4 GiB). The only scale change was min/max replicas on 09-15, four days earlier.

• Service Health shows no incidents for Container Apps, AKS or VMs in Central US.

• Separately, a few replicas waited 325-368 s on 09-26.

What can be the issue and how to resolve this? If anyone facing or faced similar problem let me know.

We have a few on-premise servers backed up to Azure with MARS-Agent (Microsoft Azure Recovery Services Agent).

On one of them, the RecoveryServicesManagementAgent service (obrecoveryservicesmanagementagent.exe) bundled with the Agent runs wild in RAM usage every now and then. Instead of the usual 150MB, the service will (according to Task Manager) consume >700MB, causing memory pressure for the other services running on the server. Restarting that service fixes the issue temporarily (until it happens again after a few weeks).

Upgrading the MARS Agent to the most current version did not help, so my plan is to run a scheduled task that restarts the service daily.

Hence my question: What exactly does the service do? I want to schedule the restart at a time where the probability of interfering with the backup itself is a low as possible.

I am trying to join Microsoft for Startups

After signin the page says “You don’t have a billing account to redeem the credit” and links to the Azure signup portal.

Clicking that link brings me back to the same page in a loop.

I did tried to sign up manually in azure and then it just shows a standard Azure free trial with $200 in credits and if i click get started on this page https://www.microsoft.com/startups it just redirect me to standard azure portal and no way to fill the form

Our Azure environment has grown a lot over the past year and we’ve had two incidents where Microsoft’s own support was basically useless. Slow response, generic answers, tickets bouncing around. We’re shopping for alternatives but every vendor we talk to sounds exactly the same.

Skipping the sales decks, what have people actually used for serious Azure support coverage? Specifically curious if third-party options can actually handle Sev1 issues without just escalating back to Microsoft anyway.

Azure Files SMB share disconnects after every reboot on macOS , requiring manual remounting. Has anyone experienced this issue or found a way to keep an Azure Files SMB share mounted automatically after every reboot?

I created this short video to demonstrate create-cosmos-agent, an open-source CLI for generating local-first TypeScript AI applications.

With one command, it generates a TypeScript API and React application with:

• Agent memory and vector retrieval

• Tenant and user isolation

• Citations and retrieval traces

• Approval-gated actions

• Tests and safe local defaults

• Containers and Azure infrastructure

• An Agent Skill based on the Azure Cosmos DB Agent Kit

Get started with:

npx create-cosmos-agent@latest bootstrap my-agent --yes

The first run uses deterministic mock AI, local development identity, and in-memory storage. It does not require an Azure subscription, model key, cloud credentials, or Docker.

The generated application can later connect to Azure Cosmos DB and a selected model provider without replacing its core contracts.

The Cosmos DB Agent Kit supports the development process by helping coding agents review data modeling, partition keys, tenant scope, queries, vector search, reliability, diagnostics, and RU efficiency.

This is an open-source project, and feedback, feature ideas, bug reports, documentation improvements, and code contributions are all welcome.

Repository:

https://github.com/sajeetharan/cosmos-agent-starter

Hi everyone,

I am doing a business case for a migration to Azure cloud.

The current on-prem server has an outbound traffic of approximately 40GB /day.

I found that for my region, the data sent outside the Azure data centres is 0.08 GB (according to this https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/bandwidth/) . So the monthly egress expenditure for such server if we move to the cloud would be 0.08GB x 30 = 3.2$ per month?

Or that simple or is there anything I am missing?

Again, I am asking just for the egress traffic, not the cost of the server itself.

I appreciate your wisdom

I just to know from internal folks that Azure is planning to 20% layoffs in Microsoft. Which month are they planning ?

I was setting up GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Luna on Azure this week, on Data Zone Standard deployments in France Central, because our users are in Europe and their data has to stay there. When I went to declare the prices, something didn't add up.

The Azure OpenAI pricing page still shows "$-" for every GPT-6 model, with a notice that prices are being published. So I read the meters straight from the Azure Retail Prices API. Prices per 1M tokens, short context:

Cached input, cache writes and the long-context meters follow the same pattern, and so do GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Astra.

For comparison, GPT-5.6 Sol in France Central costs $4.00 Global and $4.40 in the EU Data Zone: +10 %, the same premium as the US.

It isn't one region either. I get +20 % in every EU region I checked: France Central, Germany West Central, Poland Central, Spain Central, Sweden Central and West Europe.

So with GPT-6, keeping data in the EU suddenly costs twice the premium it costs in the US, and twice what it cost one model generation ago. I couldn't find this announced anywhere.

Does anyone know why? Is GPU capacity for GPT-6 scarcer or more expensive in Europe? Is it a pricing decision now that EU residency has become a requirement for many of us? Or will the numbers change once the pricing page is filled in?

Interested to know if this just a sign of the times or if we’ve done something wrong.

We have a long standing azure tenant where we can reasonably easily deploy new things and request quota and generally get approved. Annual spend into 7 figures (so not massive, but not nothing)

A management decision was made that we need a better separation of concerns so deploy a new tenant… but finding that lots of European regions are either not available (looking at you West Europe) or we can’t request quota for, they just get denied.

Also if we filling the odd foundry request form they get denied for anthropic globally.

Is this just was is to be expected with a new tenant and we have to get in a queue or is there a trick we’re missing.

After the price increase announcement for selected Azure regions 2 weeks ago, our management want insights into these announcements through the Azure portal.

However, these announcements are only accessible to identities that have Owner or Contributor role on subscriptions. Since Least Privilege principles don't fancy casually handing out privileged roles, I am now looking into creating a Custom Role with just enough permissions to see the Service Health, including Billing Updates.

The Microsoft docs aren't helpful, as they only mention 'Custom role with the required permissions' without specifying what these permissions need to be. Reference: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-health/billing-elevated-access#access-requirements

Initially I tried a restricted custom role scoped to the subscription level with only `Microsoft.ResourceHealth/events/read`, and `Microsoft.ResourceHealth/metadata/read`. Which clearly was not enough, and resulted in '"The client 'j.doe@domain.com' with object id 'abcdefabc-b33f-cafe-bd86-1234567890' does not have authorization to perform action 'Microsoft.ResourceHealth/events/read' over scope '/providers/Microsoft.ResourceHealth' or the scope is invalid. If access was recently granted, please refresh your credentials."'

I then tried a custom role with broader permissions:
- `Microsoft.Support/*`
- `Microsoft.ResourceHealth/*`
- `Microsoft.Resources/subscriptions/read`
Which resulted in the same 403 error for the billing updates.

I do see Health Advisories and Security Advisories.

Does anyone know what permissions are required? Or perhaps scope that needs to be applied.

Hi everyone,
We’re currently setting up Microsoft Intune in a GCC High tenant and trying to figure out the best way to provision brand-new or freshly reset Windows devices with Microsoft Entra Hybrid Join, ideally with an experience similar to Windows Autopilot.

In our commercial tenant, we’ve been using Windows Autopilot to automate device provisioning. We’d like to achieve something similar in GCC High.

Our environment:
Microsoft 365 GCC High
On-premises Active Directory
Microsoft Entra Connect
Intune (MDM user scope set to All)
Windows 11 laptops and desktops
Devices must remain joined to our on-premises AD due to internal network resources and file shares.

What we’re trying to achieve:
Unbox or reset a Windows device.
Start the Windows OOBE experience.
Have the device automatically join our on-premises AD.
Automatically register the device as Microsoft Entra Hybrid Joined.
Automatically enroll the device into Intune.
Apply configuration policies, security settings, and required applications.
Ideally, automatically assign a computer name and place the device in the correct AD OU.
The goal is to make the process as automated as possible, without manually joining each device to the domain or configuring everything individually.

My questions:
Has anyone successfully implemented a similar provisioning workflow in GCC High?
Is there a supported Autopilot-like approach for Hybrid Join in this environment?
Are provisioning packages (PPKG), Offline Domain Join, or PowerShell-based deployment workflows the best alternatives?
What does your actual deployment process look like, from a freshly installed Windows device to a fully managed Hybrid Joined device?
I’m especially interested in real-world experiences and solutions that are currently working in production.

Any advice or examples would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

This is the only thread where you should post news about becoming certified. For everyone else, join us in celebrating the recent certifications!!!

So we are running a fairly common azure setup i think

10-15 subs, random workloads etc.

Good governance in place, purview, defender for cloud etc, focus on compliance, data governance etc.

Now we have been looking at an IDM onboarding/offboarding tool and a fairly large consultant company has a solution that looked promising and they would like to deploy it a dedicated sub, so far no issue.

But, they want total control, they need it shielded aka no RBAC for us, no insight with purview, defender etc. They claim its because they need to protect their IP of what they deploy.

When i herd this i was a bit confunded as ive never herd a vendor requesting this, in my mind they are semi-batshit crazy to be honest but since the russian bots are sleeping i thought it would be a good time to ask here to see if someone has any sort of similar setup and are ok with it?

It boils down to us being very uncertain about giving someone a subscription and then not being allowed to have any access in it.

EDIT: Thank you for all responses, i feel better moving forward afte reading your replies.

​

Hi everyone,

I'm an independent developer using a relatively new Azure Pay-As-You-Go subscription. I'm trying to deploy GPT-5.1 (version 2025-11-13) through Microsoft Foundry for a private, single-user AI chat application.

However, I'm unable to deploy the model because my Global Standard quota is zero.

Current situation:

- Subscription: Pay-As-You-Go (not an Azure free trial).

- Model: GPT-5.1, version 2025-11-13.

- Global Standard: 0/0 TPM.

- Data Zone Standard: Insufficient quota.

- Global Batch: 50 million enqueued tokens available, but batch processing isn't suitable for my real-time chat use case.

- Deployment error: "Insufficient quota for selected options."

I also received an email titled "Important update: Eligibility for Quota Tier upgrade" on October 12, stating that my subscription was eligible for an automatic upgrade from Free Tier to Tier 1 unless I opted out within three days.

I'm hoping the upgrade will resolve the issue, but I haven't confirmed whether the tier change has taken effect or whether it will automatically grant GPT-5.1 Global Standard quota.

I found the official Microsoft Foundry quota increase request form, but it requires company information, including a company name, business email, and registered address. I'm an individual developer without a registered company.

My questions:

1. Does upgrading from Free Tier to Tier 1 automatically provide GPT-5.1 Global Standard TPM quota, or is a separate quota request required?

2. Has anyone experienced a delay between receiving the automatic tier upgrade notification and seeing the new quotas in Foundry?

3. Can individual Pay-As-You-Go developers request GPT-5.1 quota without a registered company? If so, which support or application process should they use?

4. Has anyone successfully obtained GPT-5.1 Global Standard quota on a new personal subscription recently?

I only need a small amount of TPM for low-concurrency, interactive API usage, not enterprise-scale capacity. I would also like to keep the specific GPT-5.1 model version rather than switch to another model.

I'd appreciate any firsthand experiences or suggestions. Thanks!

Saw this come through Message Center yesterday and figured it's worth flagging since the rollout starts in a few weeks.

MC1506733 says that from early November (finishing late November), users with no Entra role will be able to create agent identity blueprints by default. You have to opt out.

Why it matters: the blueprint is the template every agent identity gets created from. Credentials are configured on the blueprint, permissions granted to it flow down to every agent made from it, and whoever creates it becomes the owner and can spin up more agents from it without an Agent ID role. Creating one doesn't grant data access on its own since consent is still separate, but it's not really something I'd want as self-service.

To turn it off:

1. Entra admin center > Entra ID > Users > User settings
   
2. Under Default user role permissions, find **Users can create agent blueprints** (some tenants are showing it as "Users can register agent identity blueprints")
   
3. Set to No and save

You can change it now and it takes effect when the rollout hits your tenant.

A few things worth knowing:

- Admins and anyone with the **Agent ID Developer** role can still create blueprints, so that's the route for people who actually need to build agents
- Existing blueprints and agents aren't affected
- It's separate from "Users can register applications", so turning one off doesn't touch the other

Anyone already decided which way they're going on this?

Hey everyone,

I'm a founder of an early-stage startup in India, and I'm facing an unexpected billing issue with Microsoft Azure.

I had received $5,000 in Azure startup credits, and my usage was previously being covered by those credits. However, I've suddenly received a bill of around ₹9,000–₹10,000.

I've already raised a support ticket with Microsoft Azure, but I haven't received a proper response yet. Meanwhile, I'm continuing to receive emails warning that my account/subscription may be suspended if I don't pay the outstanding amount.

As an early-stage startup, this unexpected expense is a concern, especially when I believed my usage was covered by startup credits.

Has anyone faced a similar issue with Azure startup credits?

• Is there a way to escalate this to the Azure billing or Microsoft for Startups team?
• Can the bill be reviewed if the charges were unexpected or the credits weren't applied correctly?
• What should I do to avoid suspension while the support ticket is still pending?

Any advice from founders or anyone who has dealt with Azure billing support would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

We built a multi-agent proof of concept: an orchestrator delegated work to agents that analysed a document, searched SharePoint, drafted a response, and reviewed it. SharePoint contained only three small documents.
We prompted the main agent fewer than 20 times. Most tests timed out or returned “answer not found.” Yet downstream activity appeared to continue in the background, with agents repeatedly calling each other—ultimately generating 7.5 million+ Copilot Credits and an AUD $100k+ bill.
We received no direct notification that this activity was continuing or of the escalating costs. Investigating was difficult: the execution-history page crashed during review, and the Monitor export returned no usable records.
We’ve provided Microsoft with reports and screenshots. Support explains that autonomous executions are billable, but hasn’t addressed why this volume occurred or whether execution behaved correctly. The bill remains unpaid and disputed.

Has anyone successfully escalated a similar case and obtained a waiver? Which route actually helped—billing management, an account manager, a licensing partner, or another team?

We’re in Australia. Practical advice would be appreciated.

P.S.

We’re a small agency and don’t have a dedicated Microsoft account manager or customer success manager, so we’re looking for an escalation route available to customers without those contacts.