Azure IaaS VM monitoring

Question

How to monitor Azure IaaS VM availability. how to get alerted in case if the VM goes down or gets restarted.

Existing Azure monitoring / Alert and diagnostics providing alerts on perf counters like CPU, memory and networking. Is there any KPI that we can consider as for to alert in case VM goes down.

We don't want to invest on SCOM and find an alternative for this.

Answer 1

You can use Azure Monitoring for that and also create alerts and use them based on performance counters (CPU / memory, etc)

Azure Monitoring

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/monitoring-overview/

Receive alert notifications

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/insights-receive-alert-notifications/

You can use it directly through the Azure Portal, or connect using c# for example. All the information you need is on the link above.

Answer 2

I had good results with the "Network In" metric.

Set an alert for "Network In" with these settings: number "Less than", time aggregation "Total", threshold "15000 bytes" (see what number works best for you) for a period of "Over the last 1 minute" with a frequency of "Every 1 minute".

Answer 3

How many VMs do you have running in your subscription? If you're running websites or web services then you could setup a site-to-site VPN tunnel and utilize PowerShell scripts to test availability. We use Task scheduler to call PowerShell scripts that perform HTTP GET against websites on specific machines to ensure that the machine is up.

You could also use Get-AzureVM to test for status of the VM.