Introduction

  • 3 minutes

You can use Azure Monitor for virtual machines (VMs) to observe performance, diagnostic, and dependency information about Windows Server Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) VMs.

Scenario

Contoso is a medium-size financial services company in London with a branch office in New York. Most of its compute environment runs on-premises on Windows Server. This includes virtualized workloads on Windows Server 2012 R2 hosts. Contoso IT staff are in the process of migrating Contoso servers to Windows Server 2019.

Contoso’s IT director realizes that Contoso has an outdated operational model with limited automation and reliance on dated technology. The Contoso IT Engineering team has started exploring Azure capabilities. They want to determine whether Azure services might assist with modernizing the current operational model through automation and virtualization.

As part of the initial design, the Contoso IT team asked you, their lead system engineer and server administrator, to set up a proof of concept environment. This environment must verify whether Azure services can help to modernize the IT infrastructure and meet business goals.

As the lead system engineer, you've been asked to conduct further research into how to consolidate and analyze event log data from Windows Server IaaS VMs. They also want you to configure a task to run in Azure when a specific event is written to an event log in a Windows Server IaaS VM.

This module will cover enabling Azure Monitor for VMs, and how to enable Azure Monitor. It will also discuss how to use Azure Monitor to collect data in a hybrid environment, and how to use it to monitor VMs. Finally, you'll learn how to integrate Azure Monitor with Operations Manager.

By the end of this module, you'll be able to implement Azure Monitor for IaaS VMs in Azure, implement Azure Monitor in on-premises environments, and use dependency maps.

Learning objectives

After completing this module, you will be able to:

  • Enable Azure Monitor for VMs.
  • Monitor an Azure VM with Azure Monitor.
  • Enable Azure Monitor in hybrid scenarios.
  • Collect data from a Windows computer in a hybrid environment.
  • Integrate Azure Monitor with Microsoft Operations Manager.

Prerequisites

In order to get the best learning experience from this module, it's important that you have knowledge and experience of the following:

  • Managing the Windows Server operating system (OS) and Windows Server workloads in an on-premises scenarios including AD DS, Domain Name System (DNS), the Distributed File System (DFS), Microsoft Hyper-V, and file and storage services.
  • Common Windows Server management tools.
  • Core Microsoft compute, storage, networking, and virtualization technologies.
  • On-premises resiliency Windows Server–based compute and storage technologies.
  • Implementing and managing IaaS services in Azure.
  • Microsoft Entra ID.
  • Security-related technologies such as firewalls, encryption, and multi-factor authentication.
  • Windows PowerShell scripting.
  • Automation and monitoring.