Microsoft Adds Azure DevOps Updates, Azure Boards for Slack, Prometheus Integration, and Data Lake Preview

Originally reported by devclass.com. Published July 2019.

Overview

Microsoft pushed a substantial set of updates across its Azure platform in mid-2019, touching Azure DevOps workflows, Slack integration, Azure Monitor, and Azure Data Lake Storage. The changes span productivity improvements for engineering teams and infrastructure-level previews for data and observability tooling.

Azure Boards App for Slack

The most immediately practical addition for many DevOps teams is a native Azure Boards app for Slack. Once installed, it allows team members to interact with Azure Boards directly from a Slack channel without switching context to a browser.

Key Capabilities

• Create work items via slash command: Users can create new work items on their linked Azure Board directly from Slack using a slash command.
• Convert conversations to work items: Channel messages can be turned into work items, reducing the risk of action items getting lost in chat.
• Receive work item notifications: Channels can subscribe to receive notifications when work items are created or updated.
• Link previews: When a work item URL is pasted into a Slack channel, the app automatically renders a rich preview of that item.

Permissions and Constraints

• A Slack channel can be linked to only one Azure Boards project at a time.
• To add work items from Slack, the user must be a contributor on the relevant Azure Boards project.
• Only members of a project board’s admin group can configure a channel subscription to receive work item event notifications.

Azure DevOps Pipeline and Workflow Improvements

Alongside the Slack integration, Microsoft shipped several quality-of-life improvements to Azure DevOps itself:

• GitHub releases as artifact sources: Release pipelines can now link directly to GitHub releases as artifact sources, tightening the integration between GitHub-hosted code and Azure-hosted deployments.
• Create work items from wiki pages: Engineers can now create work items without leaving a wiki page, reducing friction between documentation and task management.
• Parent work item as a configurable column: Teams can now surface parent work items as a column in the backlog view. This was previously missing, making it difficult to understand feature context when reordering the backlog.
• Live work item updates: When a team member updates a work item, other users who have that item open will see the changes reflected in real time without needing to manually refresh the page.
• Recently used items in search: The search bar has been updated to display a list of recently accessed items, speeding up navigation for teams managing large numbers of work items.

Azure Data Lake Storage: Multi-Protocol Access Preview

Senior Program Manager Stephen Wu announced an early preview of multi-protocol access for Azure Data Lake Storage. This feature allows the same data stored in a Data Lake to be accessed through two separate API surfaces:

• Azure Data Lake Storage APIs (the existing path)
• Azure Blob Storage APIs (newly added in this preview)

The practical benefit is that applications built around blob storage APIs — such as those using blob lifecycle management policies — can now work directly against Data Lake content without requiring application-level rewrites. This lowers the barrier for organisations considering migrating analytical workloads to a cloud data lake.

Importantly, the preview maintains security consistency: directory and file-level access control lists (ACLs) defined for Data Lake Storage are also enforced for users accessing the same data via Blob Storage APIs, preserving the existing permission model across both access methods.

Prometheus Integration for Azure Monitor

Responding to user demand, Microsoft added a Prometheus integration to Azure Monitor for containers. This preview lets teams scrape Prometheus-format metrics directly into Azure Monitor without deploying a standalone Prometheus server.

How It Works

• No separate Prometheus server is required in the cluster.
• The Prometheus endpoint must be exposed via exporters or pods so that Azure Monitor can scrape metrics from it.
• Once configured, scraped metrics flow into Azure Monitor alongside existing container telemetry.

For teams already running containerised workloads on AKS or other Azure-managed Kubernetes services and using Prometheus-compatible instrumentation, this integration avoids the need to maintain a separate Prometheus deployment purely for metrics collection.

Summary

These updates reflect Microsoft’s broader strategy of tightening the integration between Azure DevOps tooling, popular third-party platforms like Slack and GitHub, and its core infrastructure services. Teams evaluating Azure for end-to-end DevOps workflows will find several of these changes meaningfully reduce context switching and manual overhead.