Lastly, let's look at troubleshooting Azure VM performance issues.
What I want to do here is give you six inbox native Microsoft Azure
tools that will help you generate performance baselines for your
Azure VMs. And the benefit of a performance baseline is that you
then can more easily see deviations and alert on those. I had
mentioned Resource Health.
This is a great way to report and alert on when there's a platform issue on
Microsoft's side and you're trying to resolve that question of is the
problem with myself and my configuration or is there something happening on
the Azure fabric, all right? Azure Monitor VM insights is a collection of
curated performance views.
This does require that you have a Log Analytics workspace
deployed and that you've enrolled or onboarded your Azure VMs to
that workspace. But VM insights can save you a lot of work where
otherwise you'd have to know, for example,
what are the most important metrics to look at? What KQL or Kusto Query
Language queries should I base my monitoring on for performance tuning,
you see? Metrics Explorer is good if you do know what metrics you're most
interested in. With Windows Server, of course, there are metrics like
percent, CPU time, and average disk queue length, and disk I/O. All of
that kind of stuff is surfaced, and you can plot those in live charts. And
then again,
you can build alerts based on those metrics. If
you're using Azure Log Analytics,
you're taking all of the Windows Server performance telemetry,
putting it into a Log Analytics workspace, and you then can use the
unified Kusto Query Language in order to report an alert.
Resizing VM is a quick fix.
Now there's going to be a cost implication, of course,
particularly if you're resizing to a larger size.
But this is one of the great conveniences in my experience of cloud computing.
If you determine after conducting a performance baseline that the server
needs more CPU, RAM, network, and storage support,
you absolutely can do that.
You can resize, and boom! Instantly, after a single
restart, that VM has more capacity.
Likewise, if you're using the standard storage SKU, or stock keeping unit,
you can boost that with a couple of mouse clicks to use,
say,
the standard SSD or the premium SSD to get much more
predictable storage I/O. Now let's do a demo and convert a lot of this theory into practice.