Azure Virtual Machines

Azure Virtual Machines provide a popular form of on-demand, scalable cloud computing resource offered by Azure. VMs are commonly used to develop and test applications in the cloud and extend data centers.

The Observe [Azure] App(azure.md) helps you monitor the health and performance of your Virtual Machines with these features:

  • A dataset containing the details of individual virtual machines, allowing you to investigate their status and attributes over time.

  • A dashboard with at-a-glance insights, such as CPU Utilization, Disk Operations, and Network Throughput.

  • Additional datasets for resources related to your Virtual Machines, such as Virtual Machine Disks, Network Interfaces, and Public IPs, as well as metrics and logs related to those resources.

  • Sample monitor configurations to enable proactive alerting on changes in your Virtual Machineshealth.

Observe provides these tools as part of the Observe Azure Integration. To use them in your workspace, install the Azure app.

Note

To monitor the operating system or processes running on an Azure Virtual Machine, rather than the information that Azure provides about that hypervisor, see the Host Monitoring Integration app. The Host Monitoring Integration app includes OS-level metrics such as memory usage and free disk space.

Installed Datasets

By default, the Azure app installs the following datasets related to Azure Virtual Machines:

Event Dataset

  • Virtual Machine Metrics

Resource Dataset

  • Virtual Machine

  • Virtual Machine Disk

  • Network Interface

Azure Virtual Machine Monitor Templates

  • CPU Threshold - alerts when any Virtual Machine percentage CPU is above a given threshold.

  • Available Memory less than 5GB - alerts when any Virtual Machine available memory bytes drops below a given threshold.

  • Disk Utilization over 80% - alerts when any Virtual Machine os disk iops consumed percentage spikes above a given threshold.

Viewing Azure Virtual Machines in Observe

The Observe Azure App offers the following dashboards related to the Azure Virtual Machines service:

  • Virtual Machines Monitoring - Summarizes Virtual Machine instances broken down by region, size, state, and operating system. Shows key stats over time, including CPU Used, Disk Read/Write Operations, and Network In/Out.

Virtual Machine Monitoring Dashboard. Summarizes Virtual Machine instances broken down by region, size, state, and operating system.

Figure 1 - Azure Virtual Machine Monitoring dashboard

  • Virtual Machine Instance dashboard also includes a Metrics Explorer, which allows you to plot any metric Azure generates for a given Virtual Machine over time.

Virtual Machine Instance Dashboard. Allows you to plot any metric Azure generates for a given Virtual Machine over time.

Figure 2 - Azure Virtual Machine Instance dashboard

Setup - Installing Azure Virtual Machines

To start monitoring Azure Virtual Machines, first, install the Observe Azure App. The Azure Virtual Machines service is enabled by default with the enable_virtual_machines_service input toggle.