Onboard Azure Arc-enabled servers to VM insights

  • 4 minutes

Tailwind Manufacturing has onboarded its machines to Azure Arc-enabled servers, and now wants to use VM insights. In this Unit, you learn how to configure and collect data from your Azure Arc-enabled servers by enabling VM insights.

Enable VM insights

You can apply VM extensions to your Arc-enabled server by using the following steps in the Azure portal:

  1. From your browser, navigate to the Azure portal at https://portal.azure.com/.

  2. Navigate to Servers - Azure Arc and select your hybrid machine from the list.

  3. From the left-pane under the Monitoring section, select Insights, and then select Enable.

    On the Azure Monitor Insights Onboarding page, you're prompted to create a workspace. You can either select an existing Log Analytics workspace or select the default. The default is a configured workspace with a unique name in the same region as the Azure Arc-enabled server.

    Screenshot of Azure Monitor's enable VM Insights page.

    With VM insights enabled, you get a message that the machine has been successfully onboarded to VM insights. This process takes a few minutes while extensions are installed on your connected machine.

View collected data

After the deployment and configuration is completed, you can view your collected data by using the following steps in the Azure portal:

  1. From your browser, navigate to the Azure portal at https://portal.azure.com/.

  2. Select Insights, and then select the Performance tab. This tab shows you a select group of performance counters collected from the guest operating system of your machine at the top.

  3. over over a graph to view averages and percentiles taken starting from the time when the Log Analytics VM extension was installed on the machine.

    Screenshot of VM Insights Performance View.

  4. Select Map to open the maps feature, which shows the processes running on the machine and their dependencies.

  5. Select Properties to open the property pane if it isn't already open.

    Screenshot of VM Insights Map View.

  6. Select your machine again and then select Log Events. You get a list of tables that are stored in the Log Analytics workspace for the machine.

  7. Select Event table. The Event table includes all events from the Windows event log. Log Analytics opens with a simple query to retrieve collected event log entries.