Tutorial: Enable monitoring for Azure virtual machine

To monitor the health and performance of an Azure virtual machine, you need to install an agent to collect data from its guest operating system. VM insights is a feature of Azure Monitor for monitoring the guest operating system and workloads running on Azure virtual machines. When you enable monitoring for an Azure virtual machine, it installs the necessary agents and starts collecting performance, process, and dependency information from the guest operating system.

Note

If you're completely new to Azure Monitor, you should start with Tutorial: Monitor Azure resources with Azure Monitor. Azure virtual machines generate similar monitoring data as other Azure resources such as platform metrics and Activity log. This tutorial describes how to enable additional monitoring unique to virtual machines.

In this tutorial, you learn how to:

• Create a Log Analytics workspace to collect performance and log data from the virtual machine.
• Enable VM insights for the virtual machine which installs the required agents and begins data collection.
• Inspect graphs analyzing performance data collected form the virtual machine.
• Inspect map showing processes running on the virtual machine and dependencies with other systems.

Note

VM insights installs the Log Analytics agent which collects performance data from the guest operating system of virtual machines. It doesn't collect logs from the guest operating system and doesn't send performance data to Azure Monitor Metrics. For this functionality, see Tutorial: Collect guest logs and metrics from Azure virtual machine.

Prerequisites

To complete this tutorial you need the following:

• An Azure virtual machine to monitor.

Create a Log Analytics workspace

Log data in Azure Monitor is stored in a Log Analytics workspace. If you already created a workspace in your subscription, then you can use that one. You can also choose to use the default workspace that's created in each Azure subscription.

If you want to create a new Log Analytics, then you can use the following procedure. If you're going to use an existing one, then move on to the next section.

From All services in the Azure portal, select Log Analytics workspaces.

Click Create to create a new workspace.

On the Basics tab, select a Subscription, Resource group, and Region for the workspace. These do not need to be the same as the resource being monitored. Provide a Name that must be globally unique across all Azure Monitor subscriptions.

Click Review + Create to create the workspace.

Enable monitoring

Select Insights from your virtual machine's menu in the Azure portal. If VM insights hasn't yet been enabled for it, you should see a screen similar to the following allowing you to enable monitoring. Click Enable.

Note

If you selected the option to Enable detailed monitoring when you created your virtual machine, VM insights may already be enabled. Select your workspace and click Enable again. This is the workspace where data collected by VM insights will be sent.

You'll see a message saying that monitoring is being enabled. It may take several minutes for the agent to be installed and for data collection to begin.

Note

You may receive a message about an upgrade being available for VM insights. If so, select the option to perform the upgrade before proceeding.

View performance

When the deployment is complete, you'll see views in the Performance tab in VM insights with performance data for the machine. This shows you the values of key guest metrics over time.

View processes and dependencies

Select the Maps tab to view processes and dependencies for the virtual machine. The current machine is at the center of the view. View the processes running on it by expanding Processes.

View machine details

The Maps view provides different tabs with information collected about the virtual machine. Click through the tabs to see what's available.

Next steps

Now that you're collecting data from the virtual machine, you can use that data to create alerts to proactively notify you when issues are detected.

Create alert when Azure virtual machine is unavailable