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During the recent Ignite Conference, Microsoft announced the general availability (GA) of Azure Automanage Machine Best Practices for Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) and Arc-enabled servers (the company’s multi-cloud management solution). This consolidated management solution, in short, named Azure Automanage, simplifies daily server management by handling the initial setup and configuration of Azure best practice services such as Azure Monitor, Backup, Microsoft Defender, and Update Management.

The company released a public preview of Azure Automanage two years ago at Ignite 2020 as a service that implements VM management best practices for business continuity and security as defined in the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework. The GA release now supports new customization options and more operating systems, including Windows 10/11, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Canonical Ubuntu, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. 

Furthermore, in a Tech Community blog post, software engineer Akanksha Agrawal mentions the additional features in the GA release:

You now have the ability to apply different auditing modes for Azure Compute Security Baselines through the custom profile. For Log Analytics, Automanage supports custom workspaces and the ability to apply custom tags consistently across servers to aid with tag-based governance policies. Automanage also supports more Arc-enabled services, such as Microsoft Antimalware.

Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/automanage/overview-about

With Azure Automanage, customers can onboard VMs or Arc-enabled servers by leveraging Microsoft’s best practices configured accordingly or adjusted using the available custom profile option (using Azure Policy or ARM templates). The service also automatically monitors for drift and corrects it when detected – meaning during the entire life cycle of the VMs or Arc-enabled servers, the service will continuously check if it is compliant with its configuration profile. If not, the service will correct it and pull the machines back into the desired state (DSC).

Tim Warner, a senior content developer at Microsoft, tweeted:

Automanage gives you not only DSC but Azure Policy compliance coverage.

In addition, Billy York, a consultant at Microsoft, stated in another tweet:

Pretty sure azure auto manages just deployed azure automation with update management and change tracking with it, along with the security center.

More details and guidance are available on the documentation landing page. Furthermore, Azure Automanage Machine Best Practices is free of charge – customers are billed for Azure services onboarded through the service.