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Beginners’ Guide for Microsoft Hyper-V: What is Nested Virtualization in Hyper-V – Part 45
Monitoring your critical virtual machines running in your Hyper-V infrastructure ensures business-critical applications and services are reachable and working as expected. Azure Monitor is a solution that allows monitoring of the availability and performance of your applications and services. It also allows you to streamline and standardize the monitoring of your services in the cloud and on-premises.
What is Azure Monitor?
Azure Monitor is a fully featured monitoring solution housed in Microsoft Azure that provides a cloud-based monitoring solution for your cloud and on-premises infrastructure. The cloud and on-premises capabilities help streamline and standardize the solution used for monitoring, no matter where the infrastructure is housed.
You can also collect and correlate data across multiple Azure subscriptions and tenants. This capability is beneficial if you have distributed services that your modern applications depend on, spread across multiple subscriptions.
Two insights are provided by Azure Monitor that relate directly to Microsoft Hyper-V, and those include:
- VM Insights
- Container Insights
VM Insights
The VM Insights capability of Azure Monitor allows you to monitor the health of your Windows and Linux virtual machines. It can also monitor the performance and health of these virtual machines and map out their different processes and dependencies.
With the VM Insights component of Azure Monitor, you can identify performance bottlenecks and even network issues that may exist with your virtual machines’ connectivity. You can also see if issues relate to other dependencies in the environment.
Where can your virtual machines exist for monitoring with Azure Monitor VM Insights?
- Microsoft Azure virtual machines
- Azure virtual machines scale sets
- Azure Arc-enabled virtual machines in any environment
- On-premises enterprise data center virtual machines
- Third-party cloud VM environments
Azure Monitor VM Insights stores the data it collects in Azure Monitor Logs. Using the Azure Monitor Logs solution, you can filter and search your logs effectively and view data for any specific virtual machine or number of virtual machines. In terms of cost, there is no charge for the VM Insights solution itself. However, you are charged for the activity in the Log Analytics workspace. You can access VM Insights for a single virtual machine or scale set from the machine’s menu in the Azure portal.
Container Insights
The container insights feature enables monitoring the performance of container workloads in the cloud and specific configurations on-premises. With container insights, you can understand the health of your container workloads, including Kubernetes clusters.
Note the following features:
- Identify resource bottlenecks with AKS containers running on the node, processor, and memory utilization
- Monitor processor and memory utilization of container groups and Azure Container instances
- View the overall pod performance where containers reside in a controller or pod
- Monitor resource utilization unrelated to the processes of the pod itself
- Understand your capacity needs and the maximum load of the cluster
- Proactively notify admins when CPU and memory utilization reach certain thresholds
- Collect Kubernetes metrics using Prometheus to build detailed dashboards
What types of containers can be monitored with container insights?
- Azure Kubernetes Server (AKS) clusters
- Self-managed Kubernetes clusters hosted on the AKS Engine in Azure
- Self-managed Kubernetes clusters running in Azure Stack or in on-premises configurations
- Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters
Creating and configuring alerts in Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor allows creating and configuring multiple alert workflows to align with your notification needs for critical notifications and others. For example, you can configure action groups associated with unique sets of recipients and actions in Azure Monitor. These can be shared across multiple rules.
Aside from traditional alerts, including email alerts and text messaging, you can trigger webhooks to have alerts start external actions or integrate with your ITSM tools.
Azure Monitor Agents
Azure Monitor does require an agent to gather information for specific services. The agent is needed since Azure Monitor can’t see inside the guest operating system, applications, or containers, and it needs the agent to collect metrics, logs, traces, and other information and forward this to Azure Monitor.
An Azure Monitor agent is required for the following solutions:
- Azure Cloud Services
- Azure Virtual Machines
- Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets
- Azure Service Fabric
Windows Admin Center
Azure Monitor is also an extension of Windows Admin Center. It allows admins to quickly onboard servers and other resources using Windows Admin Center. For example, admins can sign into the Azure portal and connect the server with Azure Monitor in the Windows Admin Center dashboard for Azure Monitor.
Azure Monitor for Hyper-V FAQs
What is Azure Monitor?
Azure Monitor is a cloud-based monitoring solution from Microsoft that allows organizations to standardize their monitoring in the Azure cloud. It can monitor both cloud and on-premises resources. In addition, Azure Monitor provides VM and container insights in virtualization technologies that provide analytics and telemetry data for your virtual machines and containerized applications.
What environments can be monitored with Azure Monitor?
You can monitor Azure resources and on-premises resources, including Azure virtual machines, scale sets, containers, Kubernetes clusters, and other solutions.
What are VM and Container insights?
VM Insights capability of Azure Monitor allows you to monitor the health of your Windows and Linux virtual machines. It can also monitor the performance and health of these virtual machines and map out their different processes and dependencies. In addition, with container insights, admins can monitor the performance of container workloads in the cloud and specific configurations on-premises and understand the health of container workloads, including Kubernetes clusters.
Wrapping Up
Azure Monitor is one of the hybrid services that Hyper-V administrators can use for monitoring and gathering insights for virtualization technologies, including virtual machines and containers. It allows standardized monitoring of on-premises and cloud technologies with a single tool providing insights for business-critical applications and is also found in the Windows Admin Center tool, enabling quick integration with on-premises servers managed by the tool.
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