Welcome to Episode 439 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott dig into two Azure agents with confusingly different names: the Azure Copilot Troubleshooting Agent and the Azure SRE Agent. Scott’s mental model is that the Troubleshooting Agent is the free, human-in-the-loop entry point built into the Azure portal. It runs as you, works one problem at a time, and opens a support request when it gets stuck. The SRE Agent is a paid operational platform with its own managed identity. It watches your logs, alerts, and repos, forms hypotheses, and can act in review or autonomous mode, much like a new member of your team.

They also work through the SRE Agent’s Azure Agent Unit (AAU) billing model, the built-in guardrails worth copying into your own skills (no deletes, no Key Vault, respect for resource locks), and the VNet integration that lets the agent reach private endpoints and on-premises systems. They close with why you might spin it up for a few days just to see what it finds, and their ongoing wish for one place to manage every Microsoft agent.

• Azure Copilot Troubleshooting Agent
• Agents in Azure Copilot
• Overview of Azure SRE Agent
• Azure SRE Agent portal
• Evaluate Azure SRE Agent (30-day trial)
• Pricing and billing for Azure SRE Agent
• Azure SRE Agent pricing calculator
• Run modes in Azure SRE Agent
• Execute mitigations in Azure SRE Agent (safety guardrails)
• Azure SRE Agent network integration
• Configure network controls for Azure SRE Agent

• Episode 438: Taking your WorkOS and LLM Wiki to the Next Level
• Episode 434: Reading the Spec Sheet on Microsoft’s Agentic SOC
• Episode 432: AI-Era Consulting Billing for Microsoft Cloud Delivery
• Episode 419: Security and AI: Security Store, Security Copilot, and Agents

Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits.

Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

Welcome to Episode 438 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. Back in Episode 429, Ben and Scott introduced LLM wikis. In this episode, they come back a few months later to compare what those wikis turned into after real daily use: personalized work operating systems, or a WorkOS, that tie together tasks, meetings, research, communications, and recurring workflows. Scott walks through the skills that now run his day, from a 9:00 a.m. prioritization pass and meeting prep to meeting capture, end-of-day review, and clipping ingestion, all while keeping governed documents in Microsoft 365 where they belong.

They also dig into how a workflow matures from an on-demand skill to a scheduled skill, a loop, and finally a deterministic Python script that any interface can call. Scott shows off his locally served web dashboard pinned in Edge, Ben shares the custom Obsidian plugin Claude built for his command center, and they compare notes on choosing a source of truth (Markdown versus Asana), filtering Teams noise down to the signal, and what these systems actually cost to run each month.

• A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs
• LLM Wiki v2: extending the pattern with lessons from production
• Agent Skills open standard
• About agent skills for GitHub Copilot
• Use Agent Skills in Visual Studio Code
• Building effective agents
• Conductor: Deterministic orchestration for multi-agent AI workflows
• Obsidian Web Clipper

• Episode 429: Getting started with LLM Wikis
• Episode 430: Scouting out Microsoft Scout
• Episode 422: Back to the Terminal: The Rise of AI CLI Interfaces

Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits.

Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

Welcome to Episode 436 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott dive into Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance. Almost nobody runs one Microsoft Entra tenant. Mergers, divestitures, dev and test environments, regional partitioning, that one AI proof-of-concept somebody spun up on a credit card. Organizations accumulate tenants the way they accumulate SharePoint sites. The difference is that nobody ever built an inventory of the tenants, and central IT frequently cannot name them, let alone say whether they are configured safely.

Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance, now generally available, is Microsoft’s first-party answer. It is genuinely four products under one blade: it finds the tenants you did not know about, gives you a least-privilege way to administer them without local accounts, monitors their configuration for drift against a JSON baseline, and gates the creation of new ones so the next tenant is governed from birth.

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Show Notes

• Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance is now generally available
• What is Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance?
• Deploy Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance end to end
• Related tenants in Tenant Governance
• Licensing for Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance

Sponsors

Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits.

Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

Welcome to Episode 435 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott take a lap around what’s new in Power BI, starting with the two MCP servers now in preview, one local and one remote, that can clean up your data model, write DAX for you, and turn a messy pile of tables into an actual usable semantic model. Ben shares how it helped him tame a 44 table QuickBooks Online mess, and why he had way better luck with it than with Copilot in Power BI.

From there they get into PBIP, the newer Power BI project file format that breaks a report into files you can actually put in Git and collaborate on like real developers, branches, rollbacks, and all. It has been in preview since 2023 and still lacks solid guidance from Microsoft on wiring up CI/CD, but Ben and Scott dig into why it is worth adopting anyway, even if you are working solo.

Your support makes this show possible! Please consider becoming a premium member for access to live shows and more. Check out our membership options.

Show Notes

• Overview of the Power BI MCP servers (Preview)
• Power BI Desktop projects Git integration
• Power BI Modeling MCP Server
• Episode 90 – Power BI and Data Democratization with Alexander Arvidsson
• Episode 287 – Power BI Field Parameters and Microsoft Entra
• Optimize your semantic model for Copilot in Power BI
• Power BI Desktop projects (PREVIEW)
• Power BI Desktop projects Git integration
• Power BI projects, Git, and Team Collaboration

Sponsors

Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits.

Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

Welcome to Episode 434 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. Microsoft announced Project Perception on 2026-07-27 with a lot of “workforce of AI agents” language. In this episode, Ben and Scott discuss what Perception really is, what it needs from your tenant, what it costs, and what happens the first time an agent asks you to approve something. Six agents. Seven playbooks. Every one manually triggered. Each agent gets its own Entra Agent ID and a permission grant. There’s a lot to unpack.

Your support makes this show possible! Please consider becoming a premium member for access to live shows and more. Check out our membership options.

Show Notes

• Save $200 at TechCon365 with code Ben200: https://www.techcon365.com/Seattle/
• What is Project Perception?
• How Nationwide stays ahead of attackers with Project Perception
• Key concepts in Project Perception
• Agent categories in Project Perception
• Microsoft Security Copilot Security Compute Units and capacity
• Work with playbooks in Project Perception

Prior podcast context

• Ep 431: Agent Governance Is the New App Governance
• Ep 419: Security and AI
• Ep 416 and Ep 412
• Ep 406: Agents of Insight
• Ep 377: Microsoft Copilot for Security

Sponsors

Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits.

Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

Welcome to Episode 433 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott discuss how Microsoft 365 authentication is moving from “make passwords safer with MFA” to “remove phishable authentication wherever possible.” The practical conversation for IT pros is no longer just whether MFA is enabled. It is which methods are allowed, which users are still on SMS or voice, how passkeys change the user experience, and how to balance security, accessibility, recovery, and support load.

Your support makes this show possible! Please consider becoming a premium member for access to live shows and more. Check out our membership options.

Show Notes

• Passkeys were supposed to replace passwords, but they’re failing for the most predictable reason
• Microsoft Entra authentication overview
• Passkeys by default and retirement of Microsoft-provided SMS and voice authentication
• Plan a phishing-resistant passwordless authentication deployment in Microsoft Entra ID
• Run a registration campaign to set up a passkey or Microsoft Authenticator
• Practical Protection: Understanding Entra ID and Passkeys
• Important Change Coming for Entra ID Passkeys in November 2025
• Microsoft to Stop Providing Telephony-Based Authentication Methods for MFA in February 2027
• How to enable passkeys (FIDO2) in Microsoft Entra ID

Sponsors

Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits.

Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

Welcome to Episode 432 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott discuss how AI is not eliminating Microsoft 365 and Azure consulting, but it is changing what clients think they are buying.

Your support makes this show possible! Please consider becoming a premium member for access to live shows and more. Check out our membership options.

Show Notes

• Inside Consultants’ Messy Shift From Hourly Billing
• Episode 431: Agent Governance Is the New App Governance
• Microsoft 365 Copilot readiness report
• Microsoft 365 Copilot usage report
• Microsoft Secure Score

Sponsors

Nasuni is a leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for both people and AI. Nasuni powers the operational file layer where work happens — helping organizations manage, protect, and activate data so teams can work smarter, reduce costs, and operate securely without limits.

Intelligink — Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!