Monitor Azure Virtual Machines

Monitoring your Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) is crucial for ensuring performance, availability, and security. Azure provides a comprehensive suite of tools and services to help you gain visibility into your VM workloads.

                Leverage Azure Monitor and other integrated services for deep insights into your VM health and performance.
            

Key Monitoring Tools and Concepts

Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor is the foundational monitoring service for Azure. It collects, analyzes, and acts on telemetry from your Azure and on-premises environments. For VMs, Azure Monitor provides:

Metrics: Numerical values that describe some aspect of your system at a particular point in time. Common VM metrics include CPU utilization, disk I/O, and network traffic.
Logs: Event data that can be used for analysis, alerts, and diagnostics. VM logs can include operating system events, application logs, and Azure diagnostic extensions.
Application Insights: For application performance monitoring (APM) and distributed tracing.
Azure Dashboards: Customizable views to visualize key metrics and logs from multiple resources.

Virtual Machine Diagnostics

You can configure diagnostic settings on your VMs to collect detailed performance counters and event logs. These can be sent to a storage account, Log Analytics workspace, or event hubs for further analysis.

Important: Ensure you have the Azure Monitor Agent or the older Log Analytics agent installed and configured on your VMs to collect detailed telemetry.

Resource Health

Azure Resource Health provides insights into the current and past health of your Azure resources. For VMs, it can inform you about platform issues that might be affecting your VM and provide recommended remediation steps.

Monitoring Scenarios

Performance Monitoring

Track key performance indicators (KPIs) to identify bottlenecks and ensure optimal performance. This includes:

CPU Usage
Memory Usage
Disk Read/Write Operations
Network In/Out

You can create custom alerts based on these metrics to be notified when performance deviates from expected levels.

Availability Monitoring

Ensure your VMs are accessible and responsive. Azure Monitor can track the availability of your VMs and trigger alerts if they become unresponsive.

Security Monitoring

While not solely a monitoring tool, Azure Security Center and Azure Sentinel integrate with Azure Monitor to provide security-related insights and threat detection for your VMs.

Getting Started with VM Monitoring

Enable Azure Monitor: Navigate to your VM in the Azure portal and go to the 'Monitoring' section.
Configure Diagnostic Settings: Set up diagnostic extensions or use the Azure Monitor Agent to collect metrics and logs.
Create Workbooks and Dashboards: Visualize your data effectively using Azure Workbooks or create custom dashboards for quick overviews.
Set Up Alerts: Define alert rules based on metrics or logs to proactively respond to issues.

Explore the Azure Monitor documentation for detailed guides on configuring specific monitoring features, querying logs, and setting up advanced alerts.

For more advanced troubleshooting and performance analysis, consider using VM troubleshooting guides.