I’m running a Windows-based self-hosted Azure DevOps agent and occasionally it dies halfway through a pipeline. Azure DevOps then reports in its server UI that “We stopped hearing from the agent. Verify the agent machine is running and has a healthy network connection.”The problem is that this doesn’t tell me why the agent stopped responding.
I’m trying to figure out how to properly diagnose this and ultimately fix it.
Is there a way to enable more detailed logging or monitoring so that the next time this happens I can determine exactly what caused the agent to die?
Would appreciate any troubleshooting steps from people who have dealt with this before.

Hi everyone,

I’m a **Cloud Platform / DevOps Engineer based in India** with **5+ years of experience** in cloud infrastructure, DevOps, and platform engineering.
I’m currently looking for **international opportunities that offer relocation and/or visa sponsorship**.

I’m open to relocating from India for the right opportunity.

**My technical experience includes:**

Azure Cloud & Infrastructure
Azure DevOps & CI/CD
Kubernetes / AKS
Terraform / Infrastructure as Code
Docker
Cloud Platform Engineering
Infrastructure Automation
Azure Monitor & Log Analytics
DevSecOps & Cloud Governance
GitHub Actions
AWS
Production support & managed services

Over the course of my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work with both **product-based and service-based organizations**, including experience with a **100+ year-old global product-based company** and large-scale enterprise environments.

I’m particularly interested in opportunities in **Australia, UAE, Europe, UK, Canada**, or other locations where companies are open to **visa sponsorship and relocation for experienced DevOps/Cloud professionals**.

If you’re a recruiter, hiring manager, or someone working in the industry who knows of relevant openings, I’d really appreciate any **leads, referrals, or recommendations**.

I’m happy to share my CV and LinkedIn profile via DM.
Thanks!

Found out on prem ADO server doesnt support UniversalPackages task, so i cant publish the build files into the feed. Where shud i store them? Rn my release pipelines fetching the files by fetching ' latest' artifacts from build pipelines

I’m currently working as an Azure Infra Admin and planning to move into a DevOps role.

I’m thinking of working through AZ-104, Python, Linux, Networking, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and other DevOps tools. But honestly, I’m finding it a bit overwhelming trying to figure out what to focus on first and how to schedule everything.

Since I already have hands-on experience with Azure infrastructure and the Azure Portal, would you recommend going for the AZ-104 certification? Or should I focus more on deepening my practical Azure knowledge and spend more time on DevOps skills?

For anyone who has moved from Azure Admin/Infra into DevOps:

- How did you plan your learning?

- What skills/tools did you focus on first?

- What should I prioritize more: Azure, Linux, Python, Terraform, Docker/Kubernetes, CI/CD, etc.?

- Is AZ-104 worth doing when you already have Azure Admin experience?

Would really appreciate any suggestions from people who have made a similar transition.

I use Azure Resource Graph when I need a quick view across Azure resources. Writing the first query is usually straightforward. The awkward part starts when that query becomes something a team depends on.

Where do you keep those queries? Saved in Resource Graph Explorer, stored in Git, embedded in PowerShell or CLI scripts, or presented through Workbooks?

And once they are running regularly, how do you handle scheduling, history, exceptions, and making sure somebody acts on the results?

I have seen useful queries gradually turn into scripts that only one person understands. I am curious what has held up well for other teams, especially when more than one person is responsible for Azure governance.

Ever since moving to Azure DevOps; we've followed this same release process for almost all our projects (we run about 15 different projects/repos). Using trunk-based development. But something feels off sometimes, and I'm wondering if we're doing something wrong.

1. Dev makes branch off of master to do work
2. Dev makes changes, 1 or sometimes more commits, pushes and creates PR to merge into master.
3. PR is reviewed and approved, merged into master, triggers a build to send master to test.

This happens for several different tickets. At some point, based on schedules, client needs, and priorities, project manager says that everything in test is good to go for the next release.

1. Release branch is created off of master.
2. This release branch is built to Stage environment.
3. Things are re-tested in Stage (not as details testing, more high level to make sure the deployment did what we wanted).
4. Same branch (even the same build artifact) is released to production.

This generally works, but results in a few different annoyances/problems:

• If something needs to go to prod before other things that are already in test (a hot fix), we need to cherry pick into a new release branch made off of the current production release branch.
• It can be hard to know what exactly is new in a release. Generally it means comparing the new release branch to the last one, but then you just have a giant list of commits (and any cherry picking that happened seems to mess with this, where a cherry picked change will still show up in the commit diff even though it is in both branches).
• We sometimes have to hold off merging things into master (keeping the PR open) just to be able to finish testing everything in Test; we can't add anything new until the release branch has been cut.
• If all but 1 thing is good in Test and signed off on, but that 1 thing requires us to wait, then everything has to wait.
• I keep seeing examples of setting up pipelines where the same pipeline has multiple stages for test->stage->prod (or often dev->test->prod instead). This isn't possible when master is what goes to test, but a release branch is what goes to stage+prod. We do use multiple stages in a single pipeline to release to stage then prod.

Outside of completely abandoning trunk-based development, can this process be improved? How do others do release management for trunk-based development?

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I'm trying understand in how practitioners think why their CI run fails

For that I am curious to know about how practitioners think when a CI run fails.

When a CI build fails and there are multiple potential causes, what’s the very first thing you inspect? Also, what’s your immediate mental checklist or set of suspicions when a pipeline turns red?
how do you usually determine whether it’s a genuine code issue versus just a flaky failure?
And at last how do you determine that I'm pretty much sure what's happening and there's not much value of additional searching.
Would love to hear how you all approach CI triage!

Hi , I have a pipeline that uses multiple templates from other repos and I have never used ADO before so I was wondering how to test my pipeline under multiple different scenarios without actually merging to main ? I am a little puzzle regarding how to do this without disrupting any other services or pipelines

I’m researching how engineers diagnose CI/CD failures when there are multiple possible root causes.

When a CI pipeline fails, how do you decide what to investigate or test next?

I’d especially like to hear about your real-world workflow:

• What do you check first?
• Do you compare the failure with the last successful run?
• Do recent code changes influence what you investigate?
• Do you look for similar historical failures?
• How do you decide between different debugging steps?
• At what point do you stop investigating or escalate to someone else?

I’m interested in practical experience rather than a theoretical approach. Any examples from your own CI/CD workflow would be really helpful.

I'm looking for a company/startup or even nonprofit where I can work on real cloud and infrastructure problems. I'm getting responses elsewhere, but this is the field I actually want to grow in, so compensation isn't my priority right now. Working on production systems instead of personal projects is.

I work with AWS, Docker, Linux, CI/CD, and scripting. CS-related bachelors and masters degree with a few years of hands-on experience.

I can commit 20+ hours a week, remote. Happy to take the unglamorous work too: monitoring, documentation, IaC cleanup, cost optimization.

The only thing I'd ask for is a real supervisor to report to and a short engagement letter with role, hours, and start date, mainly for my own records.

Any leads would be appreciated.

We're being tasked with migrating from Gitlab on-prem to ADO on-prem, however there has been resistance from a couple of engineers claiming that ADO on-prem is abandon ware, and Microsoft is focused on GitHub and the cloud version, how much of this is true ?

Hi, I built a proofreading agent for Microsoft Teams, but I’ve run into an issue where I need access to a Microsoft Teams organization to upload and properly test the bot.

Would anyone with admin-level access to a Teams organization be willing to let me test the bot on their Teams and help me get it running?

And no, I can’t just create my own Teams organization. Microsoft says my account doesn’t qualify for one.

Hello,

Recently, the Azure CLI CDN functionality was migrated, starting with CLI version 2.88.0. As a result, some of the parameters previously used in our pipeline are no longer available, causing the pipeline to fail.

When I check the new documentation I got this

https://preview.redd.it/uh6hkdai24ih1.png?width=695&format=png&auto=webp&s=0f38ffd0c0e3361ff339daac410ea13abe5eca54

Old code:

az afd rule create \
                --name 'BlobContainer$(ticketID)' \
                --resource-group $(resourceGroupName) \
                --profile-name $(afdProfileName) \
                --action-name 'UrlRewrite' \
                --source-pattern / \
                --destination '/web-com-staticassets/' \
                --preserve-unmatched-path true \
                --rule-set-name 'staticassetsstorage$(ticketID)'

Now the options are moved inside --actions parameter. But it is not working . Please check the below screenshot.

https://preview.redd.it/3ut7h85p24ih1.png?width=1097&format=png&auto=webp&s=f4cc78444a22c1b5a205f7e2b29f270b32dc40ca

Direct link of Azure CLI az afd rule documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/afd/rule?view=azure-cli-latest#az-afd-rule-create

What is this Try "??" to show more?

https://preview.redd.it/kreyzkzp24ih1.png?width=698&format=png&auto=webp&s=7d539e1c7c3d6b08368c473c35e93b881d4bbe13

How can I achieve my original requirement? please refer code block "Old code"

I'm a python guy by trade, but there recently has been a big demand to create custom functionality in Azure DevOps and this can be done through ADO Extensions.

Been using Claude to pump these bite sized extensions out like crazy and getting great results. Creates the html, css, and typeScript flawlessly.

The downside is I'm a TypeScript noob, very very little experience, so I can struggle reading through the code. So vibe coding a decent amount with this project.

Anyone been in a similar boat with these extensions? Any pitfalls?

Is this the new state of work, it's kinda crazy because I'm free to just engineer and design and not gated by different code bases, but the review from me feels less than adequate.