Tutorial: Enable recommended alert rules for Azure virtual machine

Alerts in Azure Monitor identify when a resource isn't healthy. When you create a new Azure virtual machine, you can quickly enable a set of recommended alert rules that will provide you with initial monitoring for a common set of metrics including CPU percentage and available memory.

Note

If you selected the Enable recommended alert rules option when you created your virtual machine, then the recommended alert rules described in this tutorial will already exist.

In this article, you learn how to:

  • Enable recommended alerts for a new Azure virtual machine.
  • Specify an email address to be notified when an alert fires.
  • View the resulting alert rules.

Prerequisites

To complete the steps in this article you need the following:

  • An Azure virtual machine to monitor.
  1. From the menu for the VM, select Alerts in the Monitoring section. Select View + set up.

    Screenshot of option to enable recommended alerts for a virtual machine.

    A list of recommended alert rules is displayed. You can select which rules to create. You can also change the recommended threshold. Ensure that Email is enabled and provide an email address to be notified when any of the alerts fire. An action group will be created with this address. If you already have an action group that you want to use, you can specify it instead.

    Screenshot of recommended alert rule configuration.

  2. Expand each of the alert rules to see its details. By default, the severity for each is Informational. You might want to change to another severity such as Error.

    Screenshot of recommended alert rule severity configuration.

  3. Select Save to create the alert rules.

View created alert rules

When the alert rule creation is complete, you'll see the alerts screen for the VM.

Screenshot of alert screen for a VM.

Click Alert rules to view the rules you just created. You can click on any of the rules to view their details and to modify their threshold if you want.

Screenshot of list of created alert rules.

Next steps

Now that you know have alerting for common VM metrics, create an alert rule to detect when the VM goes offline.