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Exercise - Configure the Azure Diagnostics extension

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The last time your band went on tour, your website went down while your fans were trying to buy tickets. You're not sure if the web server ran out of memory, or if the virtual machine (VM) wasn't the right size. For your new tour, you'd like a dashboard to keep track of the VM's traffic, memory, and CPU usage.

In this exercise, you install the Azure Monitor Agent on your new VM to collect near real-time metrics at the guest OS level. After you install the agent, you create a KPI dashboard to view the new metrics being captured.

Install the Azure Monitor agent by using data collection rules

1. In the Azure portal, search for Monitor.

2. Under Settings, select Data Collection Rules.

3. Select Create.

   

4. Enter the following values.

   Setting	Value
   Rule Name	MyPerformanceMetrics
   Subscription	Your subscription
   Resource group	Resource group that contains the VM
   Region	Region where the VM is located
   Platform Type	Linux

   

5. On the Resources tab, select Add resources.

6. On the Select a scope pane, select the monitored-linux-vm VM you created, and select Apply.

7. Review the result on the Resources tab.

   

8. On the Collect and deliver tab, select Add data source to configure the data to be collected and the destination to send it to.

   You have different configuration options depending on the OS installed on the VM. At the basic level, these options are performance counters (CPU, Memory, Disk and Network) which can be sent to Azure Monitor Metrics and/or Azure Monitor Logs. However, you can also choose to collect custom metrics like percentage of free disk space on Windows, or the amount of swap available on Linux.

9. For Data source type, select Performance Counters.

   

10. Change the Sample rate (seconds) for each counter to 60.

11. Select the Destination tab to view the default destination for Performance Counters, Azure Monitor Metrics.

    

    Confirm your settings include a destination type of Azure Monitor metrics.

12. On the bottom of the pane, select Add data source.

13. Select Review and create > Create. This command installs the Azure Monitor Agent on the selected VM, and starts data collection with the parameters defined in the rule you created.

Confirm that the agent is installed on the VM

1. In the Azure portal, search for and select Virtual Machines.

2. Select the virtual machine you created in the previous exercise.

3. On the VM overview page, under Extensions, you should see AzureMonitorLinuxAgent listed.

   

Create a custom KPI dashboard

1. In the left menu pane, under Monitoring, select Metrics. The Metrics pane appears for your VM.

2. Select the following values:

   Setting	Value
   Metric Namespace	azure.vm.linux.guestmetrics
   Metric	net/bytes_total
   Aggregation	Max

   If the metric namespace azure.vm.linux.guestmetrics isn't listed, wait a few minutes and try again.

3. Select the Finish editing metric check mark.

4. At the top right of the chart, select Save to dashboard > Pin to dashboard. The Pin to dashboard pane appears.

5. Select the Create new tab.

6. For Type, select Private. If you're using your own subscription, you can create a shared dashboard.

7. In the Dashboard name field, enter KPI Dashboard.

   

8. Select Create and pin. The Metrics pane reappears.

Add a free memory percentage graph

1. In the top menu bar, select New chart.

2. Select the following values:

   Setting	Value
   Metric Namespace	azure.vm.linux.guestmetrics
   Metric	mem/available_percent
   Aggregation	Max

3. Select the Finish editing metric check mark.

4. At the top right of the chart, select Save to dashboard > Pin to dashboard. The Pin to dashboard pane appears.

5. In the Dashboard dropdown field, select KPI Dashboard.

6. Select Pin. The Metrics pane for your VM reappears.

Add a CPU usage graph

1. Select New chart.

2. Select the following values:

   Setting	Value
   Metric Namespace	azure.vm.linux.guestmetrics
   Metric	cpu/usage_active
   Aggregation	Max

3. Select the Finish editing metric check mark.

4. At the top right of the chart, select Save to dashboard > Pin to dashboard.

5. In the Dashboard dropdown field, select KPI Dashboard.

6. Select Pin. The Metrics pane for your VM reappears.

View the new dashboard

1. At the top left of the portal, select the ☰ icon, and then select Dashboard. The KPI Dashboard appears.

   

2. Explore the dashboard. Try changing the UTC Time range to Past 30 minutes, and select Apply.

   

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