When you have network connections that are critical to your business, it’s important to monitor them at all times. Azure Network Watcher is a collection of network monitoring and troubleshooting tools. Not only does it allow you to set up automated monitoring, but it also gives you a suite of tools that will allow you to diagnose almost any network issue.
In this course, you’ll learn about both troubleshooting and monitoring. We’ll start with the troubleshooting tools: IP Flow Verify, Security Group View, Next Hop, Connection Troubleshoot, and VPN Troubleshoot. Then you’ll see how to use the monitoring and analysis tools: Connection Monitor, Logs, Traffic Analytics, and Network Performance Monitor.
Learning Objectives
- Use Network Watcher’s troubleshooting tools to diagnose Azure networking issues
- Configure Network Watcher’s monitoring tools to alert you when there are critical network issues
- Use Network Watcher’s analysis tools to get a more comprehensive view of networking issues
Intended Audience
- People who want to become Azure cloud architects
- People who are preparing to take Microsoft’s AZ-303 exam
Prerequisites
- Basic knowledge of Azure virtual networks
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Suppose you have a VM that can't connect to a particular endpoint, and you've already tried the IP Flow Verify and Next Hop tools. To get more information, you can use Network Watcher's Connection Troubleshoot tool. However, before you can use it, you have to install an extension on the VN that's having the connection problem. Go to the VM and click extensions. Then click add. It's called Network Watcher Agent. All right. Once the extension is installed, go back to Network Watcher. Then click Connection Troubleshoot. You can use this tool to test the connection between a virtual machine and an endpoint. The endpoint can be either another VM or an address. You can enter an address as a URI, which is basically the same thing as a URL, a fully qualified domain name, or an IP address. I'll leave myvm1 as the source VM. For the destination, I'll choose myvm2, and I'll set the destination port to 80. Then click the check button. This takes much longer than the two tools I showed you earlier, so I'll fast forward. Okay. It says it's reachable, and it shows lots of other details. It gives more information than the Next Hop tool because it shows all of the hops along the route. It also shows the latency between the source and the destination. This is important when you're diagnosing a slow connection. In this case, the average latency is only five milliseconds, so it's very fast.
It sent 58 probes, but eight of them failed. In this example, it's probably not a big deal. But if there were a connection problem, then this would be useful information too. One really handy feature of this tool is that you can click on any of the points along the route to bring it up in the portal. Another cool feature is the topology view, which shows a graphical representation of the connection path. The systems in this diagram are clickable too. Now I'll run a test on the connection between myvm2 and myvm3. In case you're wondering, I already installed the Network Watcher Agent on myvm2. This time, it says the destination is unreachable. It shows all of the hops up until the point where it can't go any further. In this case, there aren't any other hops in between the two VMs. Now actually the reason it's unreachable is that I have that security group rule that blocks inbound traffic to myvm3 on port 80, but the Connection Troubleshoot tool doesn't know that. This is an example of why you often need to use multiple tools to diagnose a connection issue. That's it for the Connection Troubleshoot tool.
Guy launched his first training website in 1995 and he's been helping people learn IT technologies ever since. He has been a sysadmin, instructor, sales engineer, IT manager, and entrepreneur. In his most recent venture, he founded and led a cloud-based training infrastructure company that provided virtual labs for some of the largest software vendors in the world. Guy’s passion is making complex technology easy to understand. His activities outside of work have included riding an elephant and skydiving (although not at the same time).