Get free/used disk space on all our VMs for reporting purposes

Mounir 0

Hi,

Within our corporate environment, we have hundreds of Windows Azure VMs deployed to users via Citrix DaaS.

For monitoring purposes, we would like to see free/used space on C drive. The goal is to have a reports showing disk space status on C drive for all VMs using PowerShell.

So far we were able to get disk capacity only.

Please help/advise.

1 answer

Sai Krishna Katakam 1,005 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2024-11-15T17:27:45.85+00:00
Hi Mounir,

Welcome to the Microsoft Q&A Platform! Thank you for asking your question here.

To retrieve free/used disk space on all your Azure VMs, you can use PowerShell and Azure's Invoke-AzVMRunCommand. This script allows you to execute commands remotely on Azure VMs and collect the required disk space data. Below are detailed steps:

Steps to Get Free/Used Disk Space for All VMs

Enable WinRM on the VM

Before running the PowerShell script, ensure that Windows Remote Management (WinRM) is enabled on your VMs. Open PowerShell on each VM and run:

Enable-PSRemoting -Force

This command configures the VM to accept remote PowerShell commands.

Install the Azure PowerShell Module (if not already installed):

Install-Module -Name Az -AllowClobber -Scope CurrentUser

Script to Retrieve Disk Space

The following script iterates through all VMs in a specified resource group, executes a command to check disk space on the C: drive, and outputs the results.

# Define the resource group and target VMs $ResourceGroupName = "<YourResourceGroupName>" # Replace with your resource group name $Command = @' Get-PSDrive -Name C | Select-Object @{Name="Used (GB)";Expression={"{0:N2}" -f ($_.Used / 1GB)}}, @{Name="Free (GB)";Expression={"{0:N2}" -f ($_.Free / 1GB)}}, @{Name="Total (GB)";Expression={"{0:N2}" -f (($_.Used + $_.Free) / 1GB)}}, @{Name="Used Percentage";Expression={"{0:N2}" -f ($_.Used / ($_.Used + $_.Free) * 100)}} '@ # Get all VMs in the resource group $VMs = Get-AzVM -ResourceGroupName $ResourceGroupName foreach ($VM in $VMs) { $VMName = $VM.Name $Result = Invoke-AzVMRunCommand -ResourceGroupName $ResourceGroupName -VMName $VMName -CommandId 'RunPowerShellScript' -ScriptString $Command Write-Output "Results for VM: $VMName" Write-Output $Result.Value }

The script will display the following details for the C: drive of each VM:

Used Space (GB), Free Space (GB), Total Space (GB), Used Percentage

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Sai Krishna Katakam 1,005 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2024-11-18T09:04:20.4966667+00:00

Hi Mounir,

Just checking in to see if you had a chance to review my comment on your question. Please let us know if it was helpful and feel free to reach out if you have any further queries.

If you found the information useful, please click "Accept Answer" and "Upvote" on the post to let us know.

Thank You.

Sai Krishna Katakam 1,005 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2024-11-19T08:35:54.0766667+00:00

Hi Mounir,

I wanted to check if you had the opportunity to review the information which was provided in my previous posted answer.

If it was helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and "Upvote" on his post to let us know.

Thank You.

Mounir 0 Reputation points

2024-11-19T11:08:18.3166667+00:00

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback/detailed response.

The command however takes forever to get the info, very often it fails. This is not practical in our environment of more than 1K VMs, not to mention that in some of our subs, RunPowerShellScript is not allowed.

We're looking for a quicker & practical way for retrieving this rather very basic info, I see cmdlets specific to disks in Azure, I.E. "Get-AzDisk", can these get us the info?

In VMware for example this is done easily:

$vmharddisk = $vm | get-harddisk

$Disk_capacity = (($vmharddisk | select StorageFormat,CapacityGB).CapacityGB | Measure-Object -Sum).Sum

$Disk_usage = [math]::Round((($vm).UsedSpaceGB | Measure-Object -Sum).Sum,2)

Any help would be much appreciated.

Sai Krishna Katakam 1,005 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2024-11-20T18:17:44.2933333+00:00

Hi Mounir,

Thank you for the additional details! Given the scale of your environment and the challenges you're facing with the cmdlet. Below are some ways you can retrieve disk space information for your Azure VMs:

To get used disk space, Azure Monitor (if enabled) is a better solution. You can query the performance metrics for your VMs, including disk usage. Here's an example of querying disk performance data:

# Example to get disk metrics (e.g., used space) from Azure Monitor $vmName = "your-vm-name" $resourceGroupName = "your-resource-group" $metrics = Get-AzMetric -ResourceId "/subscriptions/{subscription-id}/resourceGroups/$resourceGroupName/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/$vmName" ` -MetricNames "DiskReadBytes", "DiskWriteBytes" ` -StartTime (Get-Date).AddDays(-1) ` -EndTime (Get-Date) # Output disk metrics $metrics

For a more robust solution to report on disk space usage across all VMs, you can utilize Azure Log Analytics if you have monitoring enabled. You can query disk usage metrics using Kusto Query Language (KQL), which will provide you with more detailed and scalable disk usage data. Here's an example KQL query to check disk space:

Perf | where ObjectName == "LogicalDisk" and InstanceName == "C:" | summarize avg(CounterValue) by Computer, bin(TimeGenerated, 1h)

This query will show average disk space usage for the C: drive across your VMs over time.

If you have limitations around running scripts (RunPowerShellScript), I recommend using Azure Automation runbooks to gather this information in a scalable way. This can be set up to run at regular intervals and report to a central location.

If an answer has been helpful, please consider "Accept Answer" and "Upvote" to help increase visibility of this question for other members of the Microsoft Q&A community.

Sai Krishna Katakam 1,005 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2024-11-21T09:13:33.4933333+00:00

Hi Mounir,

Just checking in to see if you had a chance to review my comment on your question. Please let us know if it was helpful and feel free to reach out if you have any further queries.

If you found the information useful, please click "Accept Answer" and "Upvote" on the post to let us know.

Thank You.
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