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Monitor Azure Site Recovery

  • Article

This article describes:

  • The types of monitoring data you can collect for this service.
  • Ways to analyze that data.

Note

If you're already familiar with this service and/or Azure Monitor and just want to know how to analyze monitoring data, see the Analyze section near the end of this article.

When you have critical applications and business processes that rely on Azure resources, you need to monitor and get alerts for your system. The Azure Monitor service collects and aggregates metrics and logs from every component of your system. Azure Monitor provides you with a view of availability, performance, and resilience, and notifies you of issues. You can use the Azure portal, PowerShell, Azure CLI, REST API, or client libraries to set up and view monitoring data.

Built-in monitoring for Azure Site Recovery

An Azure Recovery Services vault supports both Azure Site Recovery and Azure Backup services and features. In the Azure portal, the Site Recovery tab of the Recovery Services vault Overview page provides a dashboard that shows the following monitoring information:

  • Replication health
  • Failover health
  • Configuration issues
  • Recovery plans
  • Errors
  • Jobs
  • Infrastructure view of machines replicating to Azure

For a detailed description of how to monitor Azure Site Recovery in the Azure portal by using the Recovery Services dashboard, see Monitor in the dashboard.

Azure Backup Center also provides at-scale monitoring and management capabilities for Azure Site Recovery. For more information, see About Backup center for Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery.

Monitor churn rate

High data change rates (churn) are a common source of replication issues. You can use various tools, including Azure Monitor Logs, to monitor churn patterns on virtual machines. For more information, see Monitor churn patterns on virtual machines.

Resource types

Azure uses the concept of resource types and IDs to identify everything in a subscription. Resource types are also part of the resource IDs for every resource running in Azure. For example, one resource type for a virtual machine is Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines. For a list of services and their associated resource types, see Resource providers.

Azure Monitor similarly organizes core monitoring data into metrics and logs based on resource types, also called namespaces. Different metrics and logs are available for different resource types. Your service might be associated with more than one resource type.

Azure Site Recovery shares the Microsoft.RecoveryServices/Vaults namespace with Azure Backup. For more information, see Azure Site Recovery monitoring data reference.

Data storage

For Azure Monitor:

  • Metrics data is stored in the Azure Monitor metrics database.
  • Log data is stored in the Azure Monitor logs store. Log Analytics is a tool in the Azure portal that can query this store.
  • The Azure activity log is a separate store with its own interface in the Azure portal.

You can optionally route metric and activity log data to the Azure Monitor logs store. You can then use Log Analytics to query the data and correlate it with other log data.

Many services can use diagnostic settings to send metric and log data to other storage locations outside Azure Monitor. Examples include Azure Storage, hosted partner systems, and non-Azure partner systems, by using Event Hubs.

For detailed information on how Azure Monitor stores data, see Azure Monitor data platform.

Azure Monitor platform metrics

Azure Monitor provides platform metrics for most services. These metrics are:

  • Individually defined for each namespace.
  • Stored in the Azure Monitor time-series metrics database.
  • Lightweight and capable of supporting near real-time alerting.
  • Used to track the performance of a resource over time.

Collection: Azure Monitor collects platform metrics automatically. No configuration is required.

Routing: You can also route some platform metrics to Azure Monitor Logs / Log Analytics so you can query them with other log data. Check the DS export setting for each metric to see if you can use a diagnostic setting to route the metric to Azure Monitor Logs / Log Analytics.

For a list of all metrics it's possible to gather for all resources in Azure Monitor, see Supported metrics in Azure Monitor.

There are no automatically collected platform metrics for Azure Site Recovery. All the automatically collected metrics for the Microsoft.RecoveryServices/Vaults namespace pertain to the Azure Backup service. For information about Azure Backup metrics, see Monitor the health of your backups using Azure Backup Metrics (preview).

Azure Monitor resource logs

Resource logs provide insight into operations that were done by an Azure resource. Logs are generated automatically, but you must route them to Azure Monitor logs to save or query them. Logs are organized in categories. A given namespace might have multiple resource log categories.

Collection: Resource logs aren't collected and stored until you create a diagnostic setting and route the logs to one or more locations. When you create a diagnostic setting, you specify which categories of logs to collect. There are multiple ways to create and maintain diagnostic settings, including the Azure portal, programmatically, and though Azure Policy.

Routing: The suggested default is to route resource logs to Azure Monitor Logs so you can query them with other log data. Other locations such as Azure Storage, Azure Event Hubs, and certain Microsoft monitoring partners are also available. For more information, see Azure resource logs and Resource log destinations.

For detailed information about collecting, storing, and routing resource logs, see Diagnostic settings in Azure Monitor.

For a list of all available resource log categories in Azure Monitor, see Supported resource logs in Azure Monitor.

All resource logs in Azure Monitor have the same header fields, followed by service-specific fields. The common schema is outlined in Azure Monitor resource log schema.

Azure Site Recovery resource logs

Using Azure Monitor Logs with Azure Site Recovery is supported for Azure to Azure replication and VMware VM/physical server to Azure replication.

You can use Azure Monitor Logs to monitor:

  • Replication health
  • Test failover status
  • Site Recovery events
  • Recovery point objectives (RPOs) for protected machines
  • Disk/data change rates (churn)

For detailed instructions on using diagnostic settings to collect and route Site Recovery logs and events, see Monitor Site Recovery with Azure Monitor Logs.

To get churn data and upload rate logs for VMware and physical machines, you need to install a Microsoft monitoring agent on the process server. This agent sends the logs of the replicating machines to the workspace.

For instructions, see Configure Microsoft monitoring agent on the process server to send churn and upload rate logs. For more information about monitoring the process server and the health alerts it generates, see Monitor the process server.

Azure activity log

The activity log contains subscription-level events that track operations for each Azure resource as seen from outside that resource; for example, creating a new resource or starting a virtual machine.

Collection: Activity log events are automatically generated and collected in a separate store for viewing in the Azure portal.

Routing: You can send activity log data to Azure Monitor Logs so you can analyze it alongside other log data. Other locations such as Azure Storage, Azure Event Hubs, and certain Microsoft monitoring partners are also available. For more information on how to route the activity log, see Overview of the Azure activity log.

Analyze monitoring data

There are many tools for analyzing monitoring data.

Azure Monitor tools

Azure Monitor supports the following basic tools:

Tools that allow more complex visualization include:

  • Dashboards that let you combine different kinds of data into a single pane in the Azure portal.
  • Workbooks, customizable reports that you can create in the Azure portal. Workbooks can include text, metrics, and log queries.
  • Grafana, an open platform tool that excels in operational dashboards. You can use Grafana to create dashboards that include data from multiple sources other than Azure Monitor.
  • Power BI, a business analytics service that provides interactive visualizations across various data sources. You can configure Power BI to automatically import log data from Azure Monitor to take advantage of these visualizations.

Azure Monitor export tools

You can get data out of Azure Monitor into other tools by using the following methods:

To get started with the REST API for Azure Monitor, see Azure monitoring REST API walkthrough.

Kusto queries

You can analyze monitoring data in the Azure Monitor Logs / Log Analytics store by using the Kusto query language (KQL).

Important

When you select Logs from the service's menu in the portal, Log Analytics opens with the query scope set to the current service. This scope means that log queries will only include data from that type of resource. If you want to run a query that includes data from other Azure services, select Logs from the Azure Monitor menu. See Log query scope and time range in Azure Monitor Log Analytics for details.

For a list of common queries for any service, see the Log Analytics queries interface.

Example queries

For example Kusto queries you can use for Site Recovery monitoring, see Query the logs - examples.

Alerts

Azure Monitor alerts proactively notify you when specific conditions are found in your monitoring data. Alerts allow you to identify and address issues in your system before your customers notice them. For more information, see Azure Monitor alerts.

There are many sources of common alerts for Azure resources. For examples of common alerts for Azure resources, see Sample log alert queries. The Azure Monitor Baseline Alerts (AMBA) site provides a semi-automated method of implementing important platform metric alerts, dashboards, and guidelines. The site applies to a continually expanding subset of Azure services, including all services that are part of the Azure Landing Zone (ALZ).

The common alert schema standardizes the consumption of Azure Monitor alert notifications. For more information, see Common alert schema.

Types of alerts

You can alert on any metric or log data source in the Azure Monitor data platform. There are many different types of alerts depending on the services you're monitoring and the monitoring data you're collecting. Different types of alerts have various benefits and drawbacks. For more information, see Choose the right monitoring alert type.

The following list describes the types of Azure Monitor alerts you can create:

  • Metric alerts evaluate resource metrics at regular intervals. Metrics can be platform metrics, custom metrics, logs from Azure Monitor converted to metrics, or Application Insights metrics. Metric alerts can also apply multiple conditions and dynamic thresholds.
  • Log alerts allow users to use a Log Analytics query to evaluate resource logs at a predefined frequency.
  • Activity log alerts trigger when a new activity log event occurs that matches defined conditions. Resource Health alerts and Service Health alerts are activity log alerts that report on your service and resource health.

Some Azure services also support smart detection alerts, Prometheus alerts, or recommended alert rules.

For some services, you can monitor at scale by applying the same metric alert rule to multiple resources of the same type that exist in the same Azure region. Individual notifications are sent for each monitored resource. For supported Azure services and clouds, see Monitor multiple resources with one alert rule.

You can set up alerts for any log entry listed in the Azure Site Recovery monitoring data reference. For example, you can configure alerts for machine health, test failover status, or Site Recovery job status.

For detailed query examples and scenarios you can use for setting up Site Recovery alerts, see Set up alerts - examples.

Built-in Azure Monitor alerts for Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery provides default alerts via Azure Monitor as a preview feature. Once you register this feature, Azure Site Recovery surfaces a default alert via Azure Monitor whenever any of the following critical events occur:

  • Enable disaster recovery failure alerts for Azure VM, Hyper-V, and VMware replication.
  • Replication health critical alerts for Azure VM, Hyper-V, and VMware replication.
  • Azure Site Recovery agent version expiry alerts for Azure VM and Hyper-V replication.
  • Azure Site Recovery agent not reachable alerts for Hyper-V replication.
  • Failover failure alerts for Azure VM, Hyper-V, and VMware replication.
  • Auto certification expiry alerts for Azure VM replication.

For detailed instructions on enabling and configuring these built-in alerts, see Built-in Azure Monitor alerts for Azure Site Recovery (preview). Also see Common questions about built-in Azure Monitor alerts for Azure Site Recovery.

Advisor recommendations

For some services, if critical conditions or imminent changes occur during resource operations, an alert displays on the service Overview page in the portal. You can find more information and recommended fixes for the alert in Advisor recommendations under Monitoring in the left menu. During normal operations, no advisor recommendations display.

For more information on Azure Advisor, see Azure Advisor overview.

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