Azure Monitor - on-premises servers (physical & virtual)

Question

Azure Monitor - on-premises servers (physical & virtual)

Bojan Zivkovic 606

Hi, I want to monitor on-premises servers with Azure Monitor - is onboarding servers to Azure Arc beneficial or installing MMA and pointing to Log Analytics Workspace are only required actions on servers end?

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Answer 1

Andrew Blumhardt 10,051 Microsoft Employee

MMA can be installed using the MSI or as an ARC extension. AMA can only be deployed as an ARC extension. I am not certain if the Azure Monitor insights support the AMA agent yet. The only required action is to link the MMA agent to the workplace (directly or using ARC). I recommend using Arc since that is the modern choice. ARC will also maintain the agent connection settings.

Bojan Zivkovic 606 Reputation points

2022-06-21T12:21:03+00:00

I have onboarded all DCs to Azure Arc and created Data Collection Rule which installed AMA but when I create alert rule I do not see for instance signal for free disk space percentage? I am new to Azure Monitor having been working with SCOM for past few years - unfortunately Azure Monitor seems to be hard to use as SCOM is.
Andrew Blumhardt 10,051 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2022-06-21T12:28:59.15+00:00

You will need a DCR rule to collect Free Megabytes. Creating alert rules in Azure Monitor can be tricky. You will need to use a custom query rule. Something like this or maybe a dynamic threshold rule.

let FreePercent = 5; //Percent free space default 5%
| where Computer !in (Suppressed) and Computer !in (Excluded)
| where CounterName == "Free Megabytes"
| where InstanceName matches regex "[D-Z]:"
| where CounterValue < FreeMB
| summarize arg_max(TimeGenerated, *) by Computer
Bojan Zivkovic 606 Reputation points

2022-06-21T17:38:55.68+00:00

What are limitations when Azure Monitor is used for on-premises servers (onboarded to Azure Arc or not) compared to monitoring of Azure VMs - we won't have Azure VMs anytime soon since we are service providers ourselves but we have no less than 3 production on-premises forests completely isolated to one another. Also when it comes to so many agents, is Azure Monitor Agent recommended nowadays and if so are other agents beneficial to use side by side with AMA?

Answer 2

David Broggy 6,371 MVP Volunteer Moderator

The easy button is MMA, however if you're thinking long term/big picture then I'd put the time into working with Azure ARC.
There are a lot of benefits with going with ARC especially when you start using Defender for Cloud (assuming you have an E5 license).

Here are some of my notes for getting started with ARC on windows (linux should be similar but I haven't added that to my notes yet)

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Azure Monitor - on-premises servers (physical & virtual)

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