how to send an alert email if an azure virtual machine is running for more than 12 hours

Question

We are running azure virtual desktop personal pools with start vm on connect. Would like to monitor uptime of virtual machines and if VM is running for more than 11 hours would like to send an email to our admin group

Answer 1

Follow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59442611/alert-for-azure-virtual-machine-running-for-x-hours

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hth

Marcin

Answer 2

Hi Sujana,

Firstly, make sure the VM has the Azure Monitoring Agent installed so it can report into Azure Monitor, you can follow the Microsoft documentation to help you if this needs to be done:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/agents/azure-monitor-agent-windows-client#install-the-agent

Once installed, you should be able to receive heartbeat information about the Virtual Machine and we can then create an alert based on the query. Here's an example one I mocked up and checked the results for:

Heartbeat
| where TimeGenerated > ago(12h)
| where Computer == "YOUR VM NAME"
| summarize Uptime = max(TimeGenerated) - min(TimeGenerated) by Computer
| where Uptime > 11h

Go to your Azure Virtual Machine > Under Monitoring > Logs > Paste the query in to the editor, amend the name to suit > Run

Verify this is returning what you expect.

• From here, you can now click the 'New alert rule' button, click next on the default and then move onto the 'Action' tab.
• Under the action tab you will be able to create an 'Action group' giving it a name and display name.
• On the notifications tab you can select the 'Email/SMS message/Push/Voice' type and tick the Email option, enter your alert address and OK.

Review & create to complete.

Hope this helps guide you to the solution, obviously you can tweak the values based on the requirements.

Alternatively, I would look to explore the auto-shutdown option natively built-in to the Azure Portal if a concern if runtime of a VM, see more about this here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/auto-shutdown-vm?tabs=portal

If this was useful, please feel free to mark as the accepted answer.