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Troubleshoot VPN virtual network gateways and connections using PowerShell

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In this article, you learn how to use Network Watcher VPN troubleshoot capability to diagnose and troubleshoot VPN virtual network gateways and their connections to solve connectivity issues between your virtual network and on-premises network. VPN troubleshoot requests are long running requests, which could take several minutes to return a result. The logs from troubleshooting are stored in a container on a storage account that is specified.

Prerequisites

  • An Azure account with an active subscription. create an account for free.

  • A Network Watcher enabled in the region of the virtual network gateway. For more information, see Enable or disable Azure Network Watcher.

  • A virtual network gateway. For more information about supported gateway types, see Supported gateway types.

  • Azure Cloud Shell or Azure PowerShell.

    The steps in this article run the Azure PowerShell cmdlets interactively in Azure Cloud Shell. To run the commands in the Cloud Shell, select Open Cloud Shell at the upper-right corner of a code block. Select Copy to copy the code and then paste it into Cloud Shell to run it. You can also run the Cloud Shell from within the Azure portal.

    You can also install Azure PowerShell locally to run the cmdlets. This article requires the Az PowerShell module. For more information, see How to install Azure PowerShell. To find the installed version, run Get-InstalledModule -Name Az. If you run PowerShell locally, sign in to Azure using the Connect-AzAccount cmdlet.

Troubleshoot using an existing storage account

In this section, you learn how to troubleshoot a VPN virtual network gateway or a VPN connection using an existing storage account.

Use Start-AzNetworkWatcherResourceTroubleshooting to start troubleshooting the VPN gateway.

# Place the virtual network gateway configuration into a variable.
$vng = Get-AzVirtualNetworkGateway -Name 'myGateway' -ResourceGroupName 'myResourceGroup' 

# Place the storage account configuration into a variable.
$sa = Get-AzStorageAccount -ResourceGroupName 'myResourceGroup' -Name 'mystorageaccount'

# Start VPN troubleshoot session.
Start-AzNetworkWatcherResourceTroubleshooting -Location 'eastus' -TargetResourceId $vng.Id -StorageId $sa.Id -StoragePath 'https://mystorageaccount.blob.core.windows.net/{containerName}'

After the troubleshooting request is completed, healthy or unhealthy is returned. Detailed logs are stored in the storage account container you specified in the previous command. For more information, see Log files. You can use Storage explorer or any other way you prefer to access and download the logs. For more information, see Get started with Storage Explorer.

Troubleshoot using a new storage account

In this section, you learn how to troubleshoot a VPN virtual network gateway or a VPN connection using a new storage account.

Use New-AzStorageAccount and New-AzStorageContainer to create a new storage account and a container. Then, use Start-AzNetworkWatcherResourceTroubleshooting to start troubleshooting the VPN gateway.

# Place the virtual network gateway configuration into a variable.
$vng = Get-AzVirtualNetworkGateway -Name 'myGateway' -ResourceGroupName 'myResourceGroup' 

# Create a new storage account.
$sa = New-AzStorageAccount -Name 'mystorageaccount' -SKU 'Standard_LRS' -ResourceGroupName 'myResourceGroup' -Location 'eastus'

# Create a container.
Set-AzCurrentStorageAccount -ResourceGroupName $sa.ResourceGroupName -Name $sa.StorageAccountName
$sc = New-AzStorageContainer -Name 'vpn'

# Start VPN troubleshoot session.
Start-AzNetworkWatcherResourceTroubleshooting -Location 'eastus' -TargetResourceId $vng.Id -StorageId $sa.Id -StoragePath 'https://mystorageaccount.blob.core.windows.net/vpn'

After the troubleshooting request is completed, healthy or unhealthy is returned. Detailed logs are stored in the storage account container you specified in the previous command. For more information, see Log files. You can use Storage explorer or any other way you prefer to access and download the logs. For more information, see Get started with Storage Explorer.

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