Now,
what is Azure Monitor VM insights all about? Insights, again, has been a
really nice engineering trend in Azure Resource Manager. Insights, in
general, are curated monitoring views for specific Azure resources and
workloads. They use what's called the workbook model.
These are interactive web pages that include different,
supposedly user friendly,
I guess they are once you reach your initial
learning curve. To quote my UK friends, it's a bit fiddly,
at least getting started with it.
Ultimately, the workbooks are in JSON,
so if you want to get under the hood, you just could go
straight to JSON instead of working within the graphical
user interface in Azure Monitor.
But at any rate, enough about that. Get off your soapbox, Tim. The neat
thing about these workbooks and these insights is they answer the
question that many customers have, look, I don't know what's important
for me to look at with my Azure VMs, can you help? And yes,
that's why these are curated experiences that you then can modify or just
leave as is. Now, all of these insights, including VM insights, require a
Log Analytics workspace, and you need to onboard those virtual machines into
the VM insights solution, all right? This solution reports on Windows and
Linux machines in a hybrid, multi‑cloud environment.
No surprise there.
And more recently, as of summer 2022, there's deeper visibility into the
health of the guest operating system on those VMs.
However, again, as of this recording in summer 2022,
the guest health extension is in public preview and is available
only for Azure VMs, not off‑cloud VMs yet.
Eventually, I'm pretty sure that off‑cloud VMs will be supported, but not yet.
If you've never seen Azure Monitor workbooks, this is what the
design surface looks like in Azure Monitor.
I want to draw your attention down to the bottom there where
I'm adding in. In a region on the page, you can bring in a metric,
you can bring in a log search query, and then there's a number of
pre‑built visualization types that you can use.
Again,
you don't have to create these workbooks from scratch. The built‑in ones in
the different insights modules include pre‑configured views that Microsoft
has found most helpful to their customers.
So it's a way for hybrid cloud administrators to get effective really
quickly in doing monitoring, all right? This is an example of the Azure
key metrics workbook. And as you can see,
it uses these different visualizations where we can see at
a glance all of our VMs, in this case,
within my Azure sponsorship subscription. And we can see
different visualizations to show CPU utilization, historical CPU disk network storage metrics.