Get Started with On-Demand Assessments - Microsoft Engage Center (Services Hub)

Assessments are available through the Microsoft Engage Center to help you assess and optimize the availability, security, and performance of your on-premises, hybrid, and cloud Microsoft technology environments. These assessments use Microsoft Azure Log Analytics, which is designed to give you simplified IT and security management across your environment.

Note

On average, it takes two hours to initially configure your environment to run an On-Demand Assessment. After you run an assessment you can review the recommendations in Azure Log Analytics. This will provide you with a prioritized list of recommendations, categorized across six focus areas. This allows you and your team to quickly understand risk levels, the health of your environments, act to decrease risk, and improve your overall IT health.

An offline copy of the On-Demand Assessment Setup Guide may be downloaded for reference.

Use the following checklist to ensure all steps in this section are completed before moving onto the next section.

Azure Subscription

On-Demand Assessments ingest their recommendations and supporting details into Azure Log Analytics. The Azure Log Analytics service requires an Azure subscription owned by the organization. If there is already an Azure subscription, then a customer representative (their registered email address) with the required Azure Log Analytics access and/or Azure Subscription access will need to be invited to the Microsoft Engage Center Space by the CSAM.

If there is no Azure subscription, Microsoft will sponsor one for the customer. The ideal owner for the sponsored subscription is the main point of contact IT professional that will be working with the assessment results. There are a couple of options to have a sponsored Azure subscription provisioned.

The preferred option is to share an organizational email address to be provisioned as owner of a no-cost Azure sponsorship with the organization's CSAM. Once the Azure sponsorship is created, an email with an invitation to activate the subscription will be sent to the provided organizational email address. Activate the Azure subscription through the link provided in the email. This account will be invited to the Microsoft Engage Center Space by the CSAM.

An alternative option is to request for one directly by creating a support ticket.

Note

Customers can choose to use any Azure Subscription for this purpose as long as the user has the required Azure Subscription and/or Log Analytics role to perform the required actions. The Azure Subscription can be an EA or Pay-As-You-Go or trial azure subscriptions. Azure subscriptions created merely due to presence of Office 365 licenses cannot be used as they don't have active azure credits.

Note

No-cost sponsored Azure subscriptions requested from Microsoft Engage Center Support by default have a validity of 1 year. These subscriptions can be extended before expiry if needed in case of renewals. You can read more about the subscription offer details and how to manage these subscriptions in this Azure Rollover article.

Note

If you don’t know the Azure owner or other roles of your Azure subscriptions, please follow this link: Role assignments in Azure Subscriptions.

Microsoft Engage Center Registration

The user in your organization who is the Microsoft Azure subscription owner must be invited to the Microsoft Engage Center Space and complete their registration on the Microsoft Engage Center. To enable users access to On-Demand Assessments in the Microsoft Engage Center, your organization’s Services Administrator must grant these permissions by granting access to "Access to Assessments".

Create a New Azure Log Analytics Workspace from Azure

  1. Sign in to the Azure portal and navigate to Azure Log Analytics in the navigation bar. If you don't see it there, scroll down and select More Services to open a search bar, then type Log Analytics.

    Note

    The Azure account used to create Log Analytics should have Owner Permissions.

    Microsoft Azure window, showing the word Log entered into the search bar.

  2. Select Add to create a new Azure Log Analytics Workspace.

    Microsoft Azure window showing that a new Azure Log Analytics Workspace has been created.

  3. Fill out all the required fields, then select OK.

If the portal doesn't let you invite the email ID you are trying to add, your Azure Active Directory Global Administrator might have blocked Invite Guest Users feature. Please refer to the below article on Invite Guest users to your Azure AD.

Next steps

Create a Services Hub Connector.