Azure Virtual Machine

Monitor your Azure Virtual Machines with Azure Monitor

Virtual machines (VM) are hosting business services and we need to monitor to ensure they can host effectively without causing unnecessary costs.
To ensure availability of business services, respond to access, security, and performance issues.

Monitoring features:

Azure Monitor Metrics - collected to describe things like performance, utilization, errors, users
Azure Monitor Logs - system events with timestamp and data, available at Azure resource level. Stored in log analytics workspace

VM Monitoring Layers

Host - compute, storage, network, state, disk
- Can trigger alerts, use for pattern analysis, cost control
OS
Client workloads
Applications in VM

OS and below monitoring requires Azure Monitor Agent.

Create a VM in portal and check it’s built in monitoring features
- Create a Linux VM with alert and boot diagnostics
- Start VM and see collection of basic metrics and activity logs
- View built in metrics graphs, activity logs, boot diagnostics

Use Metrics Explorer to view detailed host metrics
- Metrics explorer has charts to display VM CPU, data and other metrics
- Add metrics in the explorer and change types of charts and aggregation type like Avg, Min, Max
Collect client performance counters by using VM insights
- To monitor operating system workloads and applications, the Azure Monitor Agent needs to be installed inside the VM
- VM insights:
  - Installs Azure Monitor Agent on your VM.
  - Creates a data collection rule (DCR) that collects and sends a predefined set of client performance data to a Log Analytics workspace
  - Presents the data in workbooks
Collect VM client event logs
- Set up a data collection rule (DCR) to collect Linux VM syslog data and view log data in log analytics using Kusto Query Language (KQL)
- Created DCRs can select from different performance counters and sampling rates or custom counters