Azure Automanage for virtual machines best practices

These Azure services are automatically onboarded for you when you use Automanage. They are essential to our best practices white paper, which you can find in our Cloud Adoption Framework.

For all of these services, we will auto-onboard, auto-configure, monitor for drift, and mediate if drift is detected. To learn more about this process, see Azure Automanage for virtual machines.

Participating services

Service	Description	Profiles Supported1	Preferences supported1
VM Insights Monitoring	Azure Monitor for VMs monitors the performance and health of your virtual machines, including their running processes and dependencies on other resources. Learn more.	Azure VM Best Practices – Production	No
Backup	Azure Backup provides independent and isolated backups to guard against unintended destruction of the data on your VMs. Learn more. Charges are based on the number and size of VMs being protected. Learn more.	Azure VM Best Practices – Production	Yes
Microsoft Defender for Cloud	Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a unified infrastructure security management system that strengthens the security posture of your data centers, and provides advanced threat protection across your hybrid workloads in the cloud. Learn more. Automanage will configure the subscription where your VM resides to the free-tier offering of Microsoft Defender for Cloud. If your subscription is already onboarded to Microsoft Defender for Cloud, then automanaged will not reconfigure it.	Azure VM Best Practices – Production, Azure VM Best Practices – Dev/Test	No
Microsoft Antimalware	Microsoft Antimalware for Azure is a free real-time protection that helps identify and remove viruses, spyware, and other malicious software. It generates alerts when known malicious or unwanted software tries to install itself or run on your Azure systems. Learn more.	Azure VM Best Practices – Production, Azure VM Best Practices – Dev/Test	Yes
Update Management	You can use Update Management in Azure Automation to manage operating system updates for your virtual machines. You can quickly assess the status of available updates on all agent machines and manage the process of installing required updates for servers. Learn more.	Azure VM Best Practices – Production, Azure VM Best Practices – Dev/Test	No
Change Tracking & Inventory	Change Tracking and Inventory combines change tracking and inventory functions to allow you to track virtual machine and server infrastructure changes. The service supports change tracking across services, daemons software, registry, and files in your environment to help you diagnose unwanted changes and raise alerts. Inventory support allows you to query in-guest resources for visibility into installed applications and other configuration items. Learn more.	Azure VM Best Practices – Production, Azure VM Best Practices – Dev/Test	No
Guest configuration	Guest configuration is used to monitor the configuration and report on the compliance of the machine. The Automanage service will install the Windows security baselines using the guest configuration extension. Learn more.	Azure VM Best Practices – Production, Azure VM Best Practices – Dev/Test	No
Azure Automation Account	Azure Automation supports management throughout the lifecycle of your infrastructure and applications. Learn more.	Azure VM Best Practices – Production, Azure VM Best Practices – Dev/Test	No
Log Analytics Workspace	Azure Monitor stores log data in a Log Analytics workspace, which is an Azure resource and a container where data is collected, aggregated, and serves as an administrative boundary. Learn more.	Azure VM Best Practices – Production, Azure VM Best Practices – Dev/Test	No

¹ Configuration profiles are available when you are enabling Automanage. Learn more. You can also adjust the default settings of the configuration profile and set your own preferences within the best practices constraints.

Next steps

Try enabling Automanage for virtual machines in the Azure portal.

Enable Automanage for virtual machines in the Azure portal