If you can’t deploy compute, you pivot to telemetry. Part 1 was a multi-region ghost hunt for a corner of Azure that would let my free subscription build a VM. Part 2 starts with a blank slate, because Azure Monitor, Log Analytics and Kusto Query Language (KQL) don’t need a running virtual machine.

I used my blocked deployment days to build a centralized logging pipeline, write custom search queries, configure a log alert and design an interactive workbook.

Then came the humbling twist: once the pipeline went live, I discovered that almost every error in my logs came from my own troubleshooting.

As always, everything documented here comes from commands I ran and output I read.

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