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Troubleshoot virtual machine (VM) and environment creation failures in Azure DevTest Labs

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DevTest Labs gives you warnings if a machine name is invalid or if you're about to violate a lab policy. Sometimes, you see red X next to your lab VM or environment status that informs you that something went wrong. This article provides a few tricks that you can use to find the underlying issue and, hopefully, avoid the issue in the future.

Portal notifications

If you're using the Azure portal, the first place to look at is the notifications panel. The notifications panel, available on the main command bar by clicking the bell icon, will tell you whether the lab VM or environment creation was successful or not. If there was a failure, you see the error message associated with the creation failure. The details often give further information to help you resolve the issue. In the following example, the virtual machine creation failed because of running out of cores. The detailed message tells you how to fix the issue and request a core quota increase.

Azure portal notification

VM in corruption state

If you see the status of your VM in the lab as Corrupted, the underlying VM may have been deleted from the Virtual Machine page that user can navigate to from the Virtual Machines page (not from the DevTest Labs page). Clean up your lab in DevTest Labs by deleting the VM from the lab. Then, recreate your VM in the lab.

VM in corrupted state

Activity logs

Look at activity logs if you're investigating a failure sometime after attempting the creation of your VM or environment. This section shows you how to find logs for VMs and environments.

Activity logs for virtual machines

  1. On the home page for your lab, select the VM to launch the Virtual Machine page.

  2. On the Virtual Machine page, in the MONITORING section of the left menu, select Activity log to see all logs associated with the VM.

  3. In the activity log items, select the operation that failed. Typically, the failed operation is called Write Virtualmachines.

  4. In the right pane, switch to the JSON tab. You see the details in the JSON view of the log.

    Activity log for a VM

  5. Look through the JSON log until you find the statusMessage property. It gives you the main error message and further detail information, if applicable. The following JSON is an example for the core quoted exceeded error seen earlier in this article.

    "properties": {
    "statusCode": "Conflict",
    "statusMessage": "{\"status\":\"Failed\",\"error\":{\"code\":\"ResourceDeploymentFailure\",\"message\":\"The resource operation completed with terminal provisioning state 'Failed'.\",\"details\":[{\"code\":\"OperationNotAllowed\",\"message\":\"Operation results in exceeding quota limits of Core. Maximum allowed: 100, Current in use: 100, Additional requested: 8. Please read more about quota increase at https://aka.ms/corequotaincrease.\"}]}}",
},

Activity log for an environment

To see the activity log for an environment creation, follow these steps:

  1. On the home page for your lab, select Configuration and policies on the left menu.

  2. on the Configuration and policies page, select Activity logs on the menu.

  3. Look for the failure in the activity list in the log and select it.

  4. In the right pane, switch to the JSON tab, and look for the statusMessage.

    Environment activity log

Resource Manager template deployment logs

If your environment or virtual machine was created through automation, there's one last place to look error information. That's the Azure Resource Manager template deployment log. When a lab resource is created through automation, it's often done through an Azure Resource Manager template deployment. Seehttps://github.com/Azure/azure-devtestlab/tree/master/samples/DevTestLabs/QuickStartTemplates for sample Azure Resource Manager templates that create DevTest Labs resources.

To see the lab template deployment logs, follow these steps:

  1. Launch the page for the resource group in which the lab exists.
  2. Select Deployments on the left menu under Settings.
  3. Look for deployments with a failed status and select it.
  4. On the Deployment page, select Operation details link for the operation that failed.
  5. You see details about the operation that failed in the Operation details window.

Next steps

See Troubleshooting artifact failures