Credit: Dreamstime
Microsoft’s Azure Monitor for virtual machines (VMs) has entered general availability, enabling users to view VM performance trends and dependencies.
Through Azure Monitor for VM, users can troubleshoot guest-level performance issues, analyse and understand trends in VM resource utilisation, identify back-end VM dependency connection issues and locate VM hotspots at scale.
Its performance view feature allows for the observation of thousands of VMs, according to Scott Kinghorn, senior program manager at Azure Monitor.
"You can use [performance views] to figure out which VMs are resource constrained, which ones are having logical disk or memory consumption issues, or to get performance diagnostics."
Dependency maps can also be displayed, which includes VM resource blade integration, Azure metadata and dependency maps for resource groups and subscriptions.
Azure Monitor for VMs can also monitor connection failures, live connection counts, network bytes sent and received by process and service-level latency, and queries can be set up to enable alerts from specific workloads for network traffic spikes, query at scale failed dependencies and plan for Azure migrations from on-premises VMs through analysing connections over weeks or months.
To start using Azure Monitor for VMs, users can go to the resource blade for their VM or VM scale set, go to Insights in the Monitoring section, then click enable and select an existing Log Analytics workspace.
Users can access Azure Monitor for VMs through three different places, each providing different observations – the Azure VM resource blade to view details about a single VM, the Azure VM Scale Sets resource blade to view details about a single VM set and Azure Monitor to view compute issues at scale.
Azure Monitor for VMs’ pricing is included within Azure Monitor and is based on data ingestion and retention to a user’s Log Analytics workspace.
