Azure Monitoring

Question

Hi All, NEWBIE* I am new to Azure and would like to setup some kind of monitoring for our 3 cloud based servers. We/I basically need to monitor most aspects of server capacity such as CPU, disk space etc. I need to ensure that we don't exceed the 5gig ingress on the logs which I believe is free. So there would need to be an alert to stop it exceeding the threshold. Could someone suggest how I would set this up and could someone also let me know what else I could/should be monitoring now that we have started to use cloud based servers. I have been told that we should'nt incur any charges for services so would appreciate thoughts and help. Regards.

Answer 1

Hello The 5GB is per month per billing account for Log Analytics workspaces. Therefore you would need to ensure that you are using no other log analytic workspaces in the entire billing account and you do not exceed about 161 MB per day (5GB / 31 days). If you want go ahead with this, then you can set the daily cap https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/azure-monitor/logs/daily-cap Some of the metrics you ask are already free outside of the logs. the CPU, memory, network in and out can all be found as platform metrics, which are free https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/essentials/tutorial-metrics If you want to ingest guest metrics like Disk space, you need to collect the metrics using a data collection rule https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/vm/tutorial-monitor-vm-guest. If you collected just one disk every 1 minute, every day for 31 days, it would be 135,360 samples. Considering the UK South price in GBP today is £0.130 per 10 million samples ingested and £0.008124 per 1000 API calls, I think the price is cheap enough. Otherwise the easiest option to collect this data is to use Virtual machine insights, though I cannot tell you how much data this will collect. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/vm/vminsights-enable-overview. Do not install the dependency agent (as you want to limit data collection and this agent collects networking data). Also test it for a short period of time to estimate how much data it will ingest per server. Kind regards Alistair

Answer 2

Hi there, Just to add a few things to Alistair's excellent answer:

To enable monitoring: select your VM and go to the Insights icon - follow the prompts to enable insights and collect your data into a log analytics workspace, along with lots of pretty charts to see your system health/performance.

Under the Log Analytics Workspace that the Insights setup will enable, you will set your data cap and retention:

Under Cost Management is where you can set up alerts to email you if you exceed a threshold: