Introduction
Suppose you're the IT administrator for a musical group's website that's hosted on Azure virtual machines (VMs). The website runs mission-critical services for the group, including ticket booking, venue information, and tour updates. The website must respond quickly and remain accessible during frequent updates and spikes in traffic.
You need to maintain sufficient VM size and memory to effectively host the website without incurring unnecessary costs. You also need to proactively prevent and quickly respond to any access, security, and performance issues. To help achieve these objectives, you want to quickly and easily monitor your VMs' traffic, health, performance, and events.
Azure Monitor provides built-in and customizable monitoring abilities that you can use to track the health, performance, and behavior of the VM host and the operating system, workloads, and applications running on your VM. This learning module shows you how to view VM host monitoring data, set up recommended alert rules, and use VM insights and custom data collection rules (DCRs) to collect and analyze monitoring data from inside your VMs.
Prerequisites
To complete this module, you need the following prerequisites:
- Familiarity with virtualization, Azure portal navigation, and Azure VMs.
- Access to an Azure subscription with at least Contributor role. If you don't have an Azure subscription, create a free account and add a subscription before you begin. If you're a student, you can take advantage of the Azure for students offer.
Learning objectives
- Understand which monitoring data you need to collect from your VM.
- Enable and view recommended alerts and diagnostics.
- Use Azure Monitor to collect and analyze VM host data.
- Use Azure Monitor Agent to collect VM client performance metrics and event logs.