When you have a network connection that's very important to your business, it's a good idea to set something up that monitors it at all times. And that's what Network Watcher's Connection Monitor does. Bear in mind, though, that it can only monitor a connection between a virtual machine and an endpoint. The endpoint can be either another VM or an address, just like with the Connection Troubleshoot tool. Let's set one up. Click on Connection Monitor. Then click Add. I'm going to monitor the connection between myvm1 and myvm2, so I'll call this myvm1-myvm2. The virtual machine is already set to myvm1, so I'll leave it at that. For the destination, I'll leave it at myvm2. I'll set the port to 22 which is for SSH and click Add. It takes 30 seconds or so before it comes back. You can see that I have two Connection Monitors here because I also created one called myvm1-myvm3 earlier. If I click on the one I just created, it brings up some Details down here. You can make the Details pane bigger if you want. Since I just started this monitor, there isn't much data yet. So let's go to the one I set up earlier which has a lot of data collected. Note that you need the Network Watcher extension on the VM to set up a Connection Monitor. The graph shows the roundtrip latency over the last hour.

 You can set it to a longer period if you like. Here's what it looks like for the last seven days. It also shows the percentage of probes that failed, but that line is always at 0% because no probes have failed for the last seven days. Below the graph, it shows the hops in the route between the two VMs, either in a grid view or a topology view. This is exactly the same as what the Connection Troubleshoot tool shows. In fact, the Connection Monitor is basically just a version of the Connection Troubleshoot tool that keeps running. Alright, so it's monitoring this connection, but how can we tell it to alert us when there's a problem? To do that we have to go to Azure Monitor. Type monitor in the search bar. There it is. Then go to Alerts. And click New alert rule. Under Resource, click the Select button. Then in this dropdown, choose Connection Monitor. Choose the one you want an alert for. I'll choose the one we just set up. Click Done, and then Add a condition. Let's say you want to get an alert if the average latency goes above 150 milliseconds. 

Choose Average Round-trip Time. This graph is quite helpful. It shows you the latency over the past six hours, so you can see how high it normally is. You can change this to a longer time, up to one week. This would be helpful if you weren't sure what round-trip time would be out of the ordinary. In this case, it's never gone above 92 milliseconds. But let's set it to 150 milliseconds anyway because latencies lower than that shouldn't cause problems. Click Done. It tells you that it will cost about 10 cents a month to run this Azure Monitor alert rule. That's pretty cheap. The next thing you do is create an Action Group that tells Azure Monitor what to do if the latency goes over 150 milliseconds. For example, you could configure it to send an email or a text message to particular people. And that's it for the Connection Monitor.