What is Azure Local monitoring?
Applies to: Azure Local, version 23H2
Important
Azure Stack HCI is now part of Azure Local. Product documentation renaming is in progress. Textual changes are complete, and visual updates will be finalized soon. Learn more.
This article provides an overview of Azure Local monitoring.
Monitoring Azure Local involves the regular collection and analysis of data from all components of your system to promptly identify and address any potential issues. Routine monitoring is crucial for maintaining the health and functionality of your Azure Local system.
To understand the current performance patterns, identify performance anomalies, and develop methods to address issues, it's important to set baseline performance metrics for your system under different times and load conditions.
Azure Local utilizes Azure Monitor tools, such as Insights, Metrics, Logs, Workbooks, and Alerts. These tools help collect data, analyze, and proactively respond to consistent or trending variances from your established baseline.
High-level architecture
Broadly, the architecture of Azure Local monitoring comprises the following key components:
- Deploying extensions to collect log, metrics, telemetry, and alerts.
- Using Azure Monitor tools, such as Insights, Metrics, Logs, Workbooks, and Alerts to analyze, visualize, and respond to the data effectively.
The following diagram is an architectural representation of Azure Local monitoring implementation.
Monitoring capabilities in Azure Local
This section describes the monitoring capabilities in Azure Local.
Insights
Insights is a feature of Azure Monitor that quickly gets you started monitoring your Azure Local system using logs. You can use Insights to monitor either a single Azure Local system or multiple systems simultaneously. Insights for Azure Local collects data in the form of logs using Azure Monitor Agent and then stores the data in a Log Analytics workspace. It uses the Kusto Query Language (KQL) to query the Log Analytics workspace, and the results are visualized using Azure Workbooks. To learn about using Insights to monitor one or more Azure Local systems, see Monitor a single Azure Local system with Insights or Monitor multiple Azure Local systems with Insights.
With Insights for Azure Local, you get access to default workbooks with basic metrics, along with specialized workbooks created for monitoring key features of Azure Local. To learn more about these feature workbooks, see Monitor Azure Local features with Insights.
Metrics
Azure Local enables you to store numeric data from your clusters in a dedicated time-series database. This data is collected using Telemetry and Diagnostics Arc extension and then analyzed using Metrics Explorer. To learn more about Metrics, see Monitor Azure Local with Azure Monitor Metrics.
Alerts
Alerts proactively notify you when important conditions are found in your monitoring data. They allow you to identify and address issues before the users of your system notice them. The response could be a text or email to an administrator, or an automated process that attempts to correct an error condition. You can alert on any metric or log data collected from your Azure Local system.
For more information on alerting, see What are Azure Monitor alerts?
Types of alerts
The following table provides a brief description and setup instructions for each alert type in Azure Local:
| Alert type | Description | How to configure |
|---|---|---|
| Health alerts | These are system-generated alerts and have no additional cost. You don’t need to set up Log Analytics or manually create any alert rules. | See Configure health alerts for Azure Local. |
| Log based alerts | These are customer-defined alerts that are used to perform advanced logic operations on your log data. These alerts allow you to use Log Analytics query to evaluate resource logs at a predefined frequency. | See Set up log alerts for Azure Local. |
| Metric based alerts | These are customer-defined alerts that are used to evaluate metrics of your Azure Local system at regular intervals. Metric alerts are useful when you want to be alerted about data that requires little or no manipulation. | See Set up metric alerts for Azure Local. |
| Recommended alerts | These are predefined metric-based alerts for your Azure Local system resource. These alerts provide you with initial monitoring for a common set of metrics including CPU percentage and available memory. | See Enable recommended alert rules for Azure Local. |