Enabling VM Insight - Azure Arc enabled servers

Question

Hi, I have onboarded several on-premises servers to Azure Arc and installed Azure Monitor Agent for Azure Monitor PoC. Would I be able to enable VM insight on them since I found in documentation that AMA was not supported? Also Log Analytics & dependency agent will be installed but those servers are already being monitored by SCOM so what would happen in that case?

Answer 1

@Bojan Zivkovic Thanks for your question. I see that you are trying to understand the impact when multiple agents (AMA ,MMA) are installed on the server. The Azure Monitor agent can coexist (run side by side on the same machine) with the legacy Log Analytics agents so that you can continue to use their existing functionality during evaluation or migration. While this allows you to begin transition given the limitations, you must review the below points carefully:

• Be careful in collecting duplicate data because it could skew query results and affect downstream features like alerts, dashboards or workbooks. For example, VM insights uses the Log Analytics agent to send performance data to a Log Analytics workspace. You might also have configured the workspace to collect Windows events and Syslog events from agents. If you install the Azure Monitor agent and create a data collection rule for these same events and performance data, it will result in duplicate data. As such, ensure you're not collecting the same data from both agents. If you are, ensure they're collecting from different machines or going to separate destinations.
• Besides data duplication, this would also generate more charges for data ingestion and retention.
• Running two telemetry agents on the same machine would result in double the resource consumption, including but not limited to CPU, memory, storage space and network bandwidth.

For more information, kindly refer this document.