Purpose of protection policy in scale set and its usage during troubleshooting

Question

I navigated instances of scaleset--> there if we select instance, there is option "Protection policy"

1.

what is the exact purpose of "protection policy" ?

2.

how we can use this "protection policy" in troubleshooting scaleset instances

because we received information from security team mentioning seeing alerts with respect to these instances mentioning rapid7 software is there even though it is not there in the instances.

3. how it can be useful to debug the issue?

Please suggest.

Answer 1

Hello, @Varma !

What is the purpose of "Protection Policy" for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets?

"Protection Policy" applies instance protection for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set instances. This allows instances to be treated differently than the rest of the scale set instance. You can protect from scale-in and from scale set actions.

1. What is the purpose of "Protection Policy"?

As your application processes traffic, there can be situations where you want specific instances to be treated differently from the rest of the scale set instance. For example, certain instances in the scale set could be performing long-running operations, and you don't want these instances to be scaled-in until the operations complete. You might also have specialized a few instances in the scale set to perform additional or different tasks than the other members of the scale set. You require these 'special' VMs not to be modified with the other instances in the scale set. Instance protection provides the additional controls to enable these and other scenarios for your application.

2. How can we use this for troubleshooting?

Instance protection provides extra controls that would allow you to have specialized VMs in the scale set that perform different tasks than the other members of the scale set. Using this, you can create special scenarios to troubleshoot issues with the specialized VMs.

3. How can it be useful to debug the issue?

You can use protection policy to isolate the specific instances that appear to be affected by this issue for further investigation. You can closely monitor these instances to identify if there is any unexpected behavior or security issues.

Additional reading:

• Instance Protection for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set instances
• Reliability in Virtual Machine Scale Sets
• Use custom scale-in policies with Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets
• Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets now provide simpler management during scale-in

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