Azure Monitor Data Collection Rule error on saving: Update Error - 'Counter Specifiers' predefined counter categories '\VmInsights\DetailedMetrics' cannot be mixed with other specifiers. Use separate data source for each predefined counter categ

Question

On Azure Portal, I've enabled VM Insight monitoring on a Windows VM.

Within the Data Collection Rule, I try and add a Data Source with Performance Counters (see screenshot). The Destination is a Log Analytics Workspace.

I click Save and an error is returned (the Save didn't work):

Update Error - 'Counter Specifiers' predefined counter categories '\VmInsights\DetailedMetrics' cannot be mixed with other specifiers. Use separate data source for each predefined counter category.

Same issue if I choose a different Performance counter or all of them.

If I create a Data Collection Rule manually and add a similar Data Source and Destination, it works fine. The issue happens only when the Data Collection Rule is created by enabling VM Insight

Answer 1

Hi,

The UI for data collection rules understands only certain data collections you can enable like performance counters, windows logs and syslogs. Thus, when you browse data collection rules for VM Insights it cannot show its configuration. Also, when you try to add things like performance counters to VM Insights data collection rule it tells you that you should not mix these two data collections together. The best practice is to have separate data collection rules for different sets of data. For example, you will have one data collection rule for VM Insights, another one for Change tracking, third one for performance counters and windows events, fourth one for security events, etc. You can have multiple data collection rules and do a separate assignment for each rule to each VM. So, create new data collection rule for performance counters for example and assign it to the VMs you want these performance counters to be collected. Azure Monitor agent picks all configurations that are assigned and sends the data appropriately.

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