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Motivation for setting up Monitoring and Alerts
Contents
Overview of the course
What is a Virtual Machine?
Creating and Connecting to Azure VMs
Scaling Azure Virtual Machines
Configuration Management
Design and Implement VM Storage
Configure Monitoring & Alerts for Azure VMs
Summary
Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines
Virtual Machines are a very foundational and fundamental resource in Cloud Computing. Deploying virtual machines gives you more flexibility and control over your cloud infrastructure and services, however, it also means you have more responsibility to maintain and configure these resources. This course gives you an overview of why use virtual machines as well as how to create, configure, and monitor VMs in Azure Resource Manager.
Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines: What You'll Learn
Lesson | What you'll learn |
---|---|
Overview | Overview of the course and the Learning Objectives |
What is a Virtual Machine? | Understand what are Azure Virtual Machines and what workloads are ideal for VMs |
Creating and Connecting to Azure VMs | Learn to deploy Windows and Linux VMs as well as how to connect to these VMs |
Scaling Azure Virtual Machines | Understand VM scaling, load-balancing, and Availability Sets in Azure Resource Manager |
Configuration Management | Understand the basic concepts of Desired State Configuration and the options available to Azure VMs |
Design and Implement VM Storage | Gain an understanding of the underlying Storage options available to VMs as well as Encryption |
Configure Monitoring & Alerts for Azure VMs | Learn to monitor VMs in Azure Resource Manager as well as configure alerts. |
Summary | Course summary and conclusion |
GitHub Code Repository
When things are running smoothly one may not pay too much attention to monitoring. It’s when everything is on fire or applications break that we begin to work backwards to find the root cause of an issue. It’s from this scenario that we begin to talk about being “proactive” resolving issues before they happen, or “reactive” where find ourselves in break-fix mode. This also leads to proactive and reactive monitoring and alerts. Having a good monitoring and alerting plan can save you hours, sometimes even days to troubleshoot a problem and it can also help you to gain a more accurate view of how your infrastructure and applications are actually performing. Azure offers plenty of robust tools with tons of new features being released every month for monitoring and alerting.
In the illustration we can see that several metrics are created from our Azure VMs. These metrics include such things such as CPU utilization, network and disk I/O. This is made possible by the Azure VM Agent that runs on each newly deployed Azure VM. However, we also have the ability to turn on VM Diagnostics which gives us an even deeper view into our VM performance. Enabling Diagnostics on a VM deploys the AzureRmVMDiagnosticsExtension which gathers a wealth of useful information for monitoring including Event logs and stores them in your VM storage account. But of course with more data means more storage, so just be mindful of the amount of diagnostic data you’re using in your storage accounts.
Alerting is also available in Azure. We can configure alerts based on cpu utilization and other metrics and email service owners based on preconfigured thresholds.
Chris has over 15 years of experience working with top IT Enterprise businesses. Having worked at Google helping to launch Gmail, YouTube, Maps and more and most recently at Microsoft working directly with Microsoft Azure for both Commercial and Public Sectors, Chris brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the team in architecting complex solutions and advanced troubleshooting techniques. He holds several Microsoft Certifications including Azure Certifications.
In his spare time, Chris enjoys movies, gaming, outdoor activities, and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.