How to monitor guest OS CPU percentage for an Azure VM

Question

I would like to monitor and get alerts on the guest OS CPU utilization for our Azure VMs.

As I understand it the "Percentage CPU" under Metrics in the Azure portal is the percent of they underlying hardware or something other than the Guest OS. For example, Percentage CPU can show ~20% when our guest OS shows 100%.

I can not find a way in Metrics, Alerts, or Diagnostic settings to get the "CPU Percentage Guest OS". I have read that this is an extended metric but I can't figure out how to access it.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
-Mont

Answer 1

@Mont Welcome to Microsoft Q & A Community Forum. Glad to know that you have resolved the issue. For the benefit of the community, adding some information and references.

• To monitor guest operating systems, you need to enable VM Insights solution which in turn installs Log Analytics Agent and Dependency Agent to collect metrics. For more information, refer this document.
• The Azure Monitor agent replaces the Log Analytics agent when it fully supports Azure Monitor, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, and Microsoft Sentinel. Until that time, it can be installed with the Log Analytics agent to send performance data from the guest operating system of machines to Azure Monitor Metrics. This configuration allows you to evaluate this data with metrics explorer and use metric alerts. For more information, check out this document.

Answer 2

I found the answer to this. I needed to enable Insights on the VM. Part of this installs an agent in the guest OS. Insights can then give Guest OS metrics.