Azure Monitor Agent: collect just the VM HeartBeat and not the Performance?

Question

We need to collect only the VM Heartbeats and not the Performance counters. We have thousands of VM and the goal is to alert the VM availability.

Answer 1

Hi anonymous user

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A! Thanks for posting the question.

If you only need to monitor for resource availability, here are some of the options that you can use:

1. Using the VM's Resource Health is one of the options. You can also configure to be alerted by creating Resource Health Alert available under "Resource Health" of the VM.
2. If you are using "Azure Monitor Agent", you can control the amount of data being collected and forwarded to workspace by using editing the data collection rule. I was not able to find a way to completely disable the perf/log collection and only keep Heartbeat, but using Data Collection Rule, you can control the amount of data being collected.
3. If you are specifically looking for Heartbeat data from Azure VMs, you can use Log Analytics agent and connect it to a Log Analytics workspace. When the Log Analytics agent is connected to a workspace, only heartbeat data is collected by default. You can configure further data collection using the solutions added to the workspace. In case you have already added a couple of solutions but wish to remove them (in favor of Heartbeat), you can follow the steps available in this link to remove all the solutions. If the Log Analytics agent is connected to a workspace, only the heartbeat will be forwarded in absence of any other solutions available.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

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