Packet monitoring allows you to diagnose your server by capturing and displaying network traffic through the networking stack in a log that is filtered, organized, and easy to follow and manipulate.
Monitor, diagnose, and gain insight into the performance and availability of your applications and services with Azure Monitor. In this video, you’ll learn how to use Azure Monitor to collect, analyze and act on telemetry from your cloud and on-premises environments.
Learn how to create time series charts of platform and resource metrics for visualization and analysis with Azure Monitor. Start in Azure Monitor to view metrics across multiple resources or start directly from individual resource blades. You will also learn how to add metrics charts to dashboards in the Azure portal for real-time monitoring and shared access across teams.
In this video, learn about action rules and how you can use them to configure actions and notifications for multiple alerts at scale across a subscription, resource group, and target resource.
In this video, learn how alerts enable you to proactively identify and address issues before it impacts the users of your system. Alerts are created on performance and availability data and can be associated with user-defined actions and notification mechanisms.
In this video, learn how to use source map support in Azure Monitor Application Insights to improve the diagnosis of client-side JavaScript errors. Source maps can be used to unminify call stacks found on the Application Insights end to end transaction details page.
Here you find more information about Microsoft Azure Monitor:
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) makes it simple to deploy a managed Kubernetes cluster in Azure. AKS reduces the complexity and operational overhead of managing Kubernetes by offloading much of that responsibility to Azure. As a hosted Kubernetes service, Azure handles critical tasks like health monitoring and maintenance for you. The Kubernetes masters are managed by Azure. You only manage and maintain the agent nodes.
Azure AKS Kubernetes Services in Resource Group.
When you go to settings of your Azure AKS Kubernetes Cluster and then to Upgrade, there you can see your version of Kubernetes and the New versions of Azure AKS Services. Before you upgrade :
Important : Never skip an Upgrade version of Azure AKS Kubernetes.
You can Upgrade from here by clicking on version 1.15.5 and click on Save at the top.
Azure Activity log.
When the first upgrade is succeeded you can do the next version upgrade.
With Azure Monitoring Insights you can view the live data and see what’s going on.
Azure Monitoring Container Insights.
When the upgrade is completed, you want to see if your new Azure AKS Cluster Services is Healthy.
This Health (Preview) feature is handy to see if all Services are running good.
Azure Monitoring Insights Health of the AKS Kubernetes Services.
The Upgrades are of course also possible via Microsoft Azure Cloud Shell with Azure CLI
As a DevOps person you like to work with Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Deploying and managing your Azure AKS Kubernetes Cluster services from there with the right extensions.
Here you see also that the KubeProxyVersion is v1.15.7
The extension for developers building applications to run in Kubernetes clusters and for DevOps staff troubleshooting Kubernetes applications.
Features include:
View your clusters in an explorer tree view, and drill into workloads, services, pods and nodes.
Browse Helm repos and install charts into your Kubernetes cluster.
Intellisense for Kubernetes resources and Helm charts and templates.
Edit Kubernetes resource manifests and apply them to your cluster.
Build and run containers in your cluster from Dockerfiles in your project.
View diffs of a resource’s current state against the resource manifest in your Git repo
Easily check out the Git commit corresponding to a deployed application.
Run commands or start a shell within your application’s pods.
Get or follow logs and events from your clusters.
Forward local ports to your application’s pods.
Create Helm charts using scaffolding and snippets.
Bootstrap applications using Draft, and rapidly deploy and debug them to speed up the development loop.
Upgrade Azure AKS Kubernetes Services is Done 😉
When you manage and monitor your Azure AKS Kubernetes Cluster Services, have also a look at Microsoft Azure Advisor for new features and security issues :
Azure Advisor recommendations for Kubernetes services.
The cool thing is that Microsoft also give you the solution to solve a high risk :
Remediation steps.
Conclusion :
Microsoft Azure AKS Kubernetes is a managed services and made upgrading for customers really easy to do. You can monitor the upgrades and see the Health status of the Azure AKS Kubernetes services. You get free advise to improve the Services and this all keeps you in control and your business running.
Microsoft Windows Admin Center for Hybrid IT Management
I really like to work with Microsoft Windows Admin Center for managing my Hybrid workloads Windows Servers in Azure Cloud Services but also our On-premises Servers on Hyper-V and VMware platform. Even our physical Windows Servers can be managed from Windows Admin Center.
You can extend on-premises deployments of Windows Server to the cloud by using Azure hybrid services. These cloud services provide an array of useful functions, including the following:
Protect virtual machines and use cloud-based backup and disaster recovery (HA/DR) with Azure Site Recovery.
Track what’s happening across your applications, network and infrastructure with the help of advanced analytics and machine learning in Azure Monitor.
Simplify network connectivity to Azure with Azure Network Adapter.
Keep virtual machines up to date with Azure Update Management.
Azure hybrid services work with Windows Servers in the following configurations:
Stand-alone physical servers and virtual machines (VMs)
I’m working with Windows Admin Center since day one, and you see the hybrid management tool evolving with great new features to make your life as an Administrator more easier. For example you get notifications when there are updates in extensions.
Notification details about update Extensions
When you click on the link “Go to Extensions” you will see the Extensions installed and the Updates which you can install from there.
Here you see an Azure Security Center Extension update.
There are not only Microsoft extensions, but also third party solution extensions and you could build your own extension for your solution. Here you find all the information about Windows Admin Center Extensions
Third Party Windows Admin Center Extensions
Installing a New extension is easy to do, the Azure Cloud Shell (Preview) was the last extension I installed in my Azure MVP Lab to work with. Azure Cloud Shell is an interactive, authenticated, browser-accessible shell for managing Azure resources. It provides the flexibility of choosing the shell experience that best suits the way you work, either Bash or PowerShell. Cloud Shell enables access to a browser-based command-line experience built with Azure management tasks in mind. So how does this look in Windows Admin Center?
Install the Azure Cloud Shell (Preview) Extension
You find the Installed Azure Cloud Shell in the pulldown menu of WAC
For Management of your Windows Servers you need some tools and consoles. Windows Admin Center is supporting you to get the Management consoles in one place to do your administration and updates.
The next tree Features are in Windows Admin Center to manage your Windows Server.
Powershell inside WAC of my Domain Controller
Windows PowerShell is a task-based command-line shell and scripting language designed especially for system administration. Built on the .NET Framework, Windows PowerShell helps IT professionals and power users control and automate the administration of the Windows operating system and applications that run on Windows.
Here you find more information about Windows Commands
Windows Update in Windows Admin Center.
Of course you need to update your Windows Servers, and what I like in WAC is that you get the information if an update needs a reboot before you click on Install Updates. This option is good for my Azure MVP Lab but when you need to update more then 100 Servers, you would do that centrally managed like with Update Management solution in Azure
Windows Remote Desktop in WAC
Remote Desktop is one of the Features of Windows Admin Center, to take over the desktop for installations of Applications for example.
Windows Admin Center got a lot more Features and Tools to Manage your Windows Servers in a Hybrid world.
Like these :
Storage
Security
System Insights
Scheduled Tasks
Installing Roles and Features of Windows Server
Registry
Processes running on your Windows Server
Managing and deploying Clusters
and much More………
You can install the following Resources to Manage with WAC
Windows Admin Center Overview
Conclusion:
Microsoft Windows Admin Center is the New Management tool for your Hybrid IT Management to Controle your Servers for your Business. It got all the Management consoles covered of Windows Servers to manage from one tool.
It’s easy to use and It keeps you Up-to-date of what is happening on your Windows Server but also what is New and updated. With Microsoft Windows Admin Center your are learning on the job and that’s what I Like 😉
Hope you will use Microsoft Windows Admin Center too for your Business, download it here for Free!
When you install Azure Virtual Machines or Kubernetes Clusters in the Microsoft Cloud, It’s important to monitor your workload and keep your IT department in Control for the Business. Metric alerts in Azure Monitor work on top of multi-dimensional metrics. These metrics could be platform metrics, custom metrics, popular logs from Azure Monitor converted to metrics and Application Insights metrics.
IT Department of a company has most of the time different teams with each having it’s own responsibility of workloads in the Microsoft Cloud. For example, the Servicedesk is supporting the Business and they like to see if all the Services are up and running for the Business. The Infrastructure Team wants the same, but on deep level components of the Services like Memory, Network, Storage, CPU, Performance, Availability and more. The Technical Application Team is interested if the application is running and working with all the Interfaces, Databases, and/or Azure Pipelines.
Each Team can build there own Azure Dashboard(s) in the Microsoft Cloud.
Here I Have made an easy example of my Windows Server 2019 Virtual Machines and my Azure Kubernetes Cluster in One Microsoft Azure Dashboard :
You can Start from Azure Monitor Metrics
Or you can Start from the Virtual Machine Blade here.
When you have your Azure Monitor metrics ready with the right information then you can create it in your Azure Dashboard for your Team.
Select another Dashboard.
Create your Own Dashboard.
Now we have the first VM with CPU percentage in the Azure Dashboard.
Here I have added More Virtual Machines to the Same Metric Chart.
When you have Azure Kubernetes Cluster to monitor :
From here you can Add Container Insights information into your Azure Dashboard :
Adding Azure Monitor Container Insights of KubeCluster01
The Azure Monitor Container Insights logs for your Dashboard information, with Pin to Dashboard.
Azure Monitor for containers is a feature designed to monitor the performance of container workloads deployed to either Azure Container Instances or managed Kubernetes clusters hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Monitoring your containers is critical, especially when you’re running a production cluster, at scale, with multiple applications.
Azure Monitor for containers gives you performance visibility by collecting memory and processor metrics from controllers, nodes, and containers that are available in Kubernetes through the Metrics API. Container logs are also collected. After you enable monitoring from Kubernetes clusters, these metrics and logs are automatically collected for you through a containerized version of the Log Analytics agent for Linux and stored in your Log Analytics workspace.
Get best practices on how to monitor your Kubernetes clusters from field experts in this episode of the Kubernetes Best Practices Series. In this intermediate level deep dive, you will learn about monitoring and logging in Kubernetes from Dennis Zielke, Technology Solutions Professional in the Global Black Belts Cloud Native Applications team at Microsoft.
Multi-cluster view from Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor provides a multi-cluster view showing the health status of all monitored AKS clusters deployed across resource groups in your subscriptions. It shows AKS clusters discovered that are not monitored by the solution. Immediately you can understand cluster health, and from here you can drill down to the node and controller performance page, or navigate to see performance charts for the cluster. For AKS clusters discovered and identified as unmonitored, you can enable monitoring for that cluster at any time.
Container Live Logs provides a real-time view into your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) container logs (stdout/stderr) without having to run kubectl commands. When you select this option, new pane appears below the containers performance data table on the Containers view, and it shows live logging generated by the container engine to further assist in troubleshooting issues in real time.
Live logs supports three different methods to control access to the logs:
AKS without Kubernetes RBAC authorization enabled
AKS enabled with Kubernetes RBAC authorization
AKS enabled with Azure Active Directory (AD) SAML based single-sign on
You even can search in the Container Live Logs for Troubleshooting and history.
Azure Monitor for VMs monitors your Azure virtual machines (VM) and virtual machine scale sets at scale. The service analyzes the performance and health of your Windows and Linux VMs, monitoring their processes and their dependencies on other resources and external processes.
As a solution, Azure Monitor for VMs includes support for monitoring performance and application dependencies for VMs that are hosted on-premises or in another cloud provider. Three key features deliver in-depth insight:
Logical components of Azure VMs that run Windows and Linux: Are measured against pre-configured health criteria, and they alert you when the evaluated condition is met.
Pre-defined, trending performance charts: Display core performance metrics from the guest VM operating system.
Dependency map: Displays the interconnected components with the VM from various resource groups and subscriptions.
The features are organized into three perspectives:
Health
Performance
Map
Here we have a look at Azure Monitor Service map of my local machine :
Here in the Event you see two Configuration Changes.
What is awesome to see, when you double click on the link marked with a arrow, then It will start log analytics with the right query to see what those changes are 🙂
You see some Changes in Windows Services and Updates on my local Machine
Communications of the local machine on-premisses
Workbooks combine text, Analytics queries, Azure Metrics, and parameters into rich interactive reports. Workbooks are editable by any other team members who have access to the same Azure resources.
Azure Monitor for containers is a feature designed to monitor the performance of container workloads deployed to either Azure Container Instances or managed Kubernetes clusters hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Monitoring your containers is critical, especially when you’re running a production cluster, at scale, with multiple applications.
Azure Monitor for containers gives you performance visibility by collecting memory and processor metrics from controllers, nodes, and containers that are available in Kubernetes through the Metrics API. Container logs are also collected. After you enable monitoring from Kubernetes clusters, these metrics and logs are automatically collected for you through a containerized version of the Log Analytics agent for Linux and stored in your Log Analytics workspace.
What I really like is that you now can see the Container Live logs from the Azure portal and see what is going on in the background of a Container 🙂
Activate Azure Kubernetes Container Live Logs
Here you see the Container Live logs
This feature provides a real-time view into your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) container logs (stdout/stderr) without having to run kubectl commands. When you select this option, new pane appears below the containers performance data table on the Containers view, and it shows live logging generated by the container engine to further assist in troubleshooting issues in real time.
Live logs supports three different methods to control access to the logs:
AKS without Kubernetes RBAC authorization enabled
AKS enabled with Kubernetes RBAC authorization
AKS enabled with Azure Active Directory (AD) SAML based single-sign on
You even can search in the Container Live Logs for Troubleshooting and history :
Search on ssh
Azure Monitor for containers uses a containerized version of the Log Analytics agent for Linux. After initial deployment, there are routine or optional tasks you may need to perform during its lifecycle.
Because of this agent you can work with Log Analytics in Azure Monitor :
When you have your production workload running on Azure Kubernetes Clusters, It’s important to monitor to keep you in Control of the solution in Microsoft Azure and watch for improvements like performance for the business. With Container Live logs you can see what is going on in the Containers when you have issues and that’s great for troubleshooting to get your problem solved fast. Get your workload into Azure Containers and make your Azure DevOps CI/CD Pipelines in the Cloud.
There are a range of tools for monitoring your Azure environment, from the application code running on Azure to the services and infrastructure hosting your application. These tools work together to offer comprehensive cloud monitoring and include:
Azure Monitor – the Azure service that operates as a consolidated pipeline for all monitoring data from Azure services. It gives you access to performance metrics and events that describe the operation of the Azure infrastructure and any Azure services you are using. Azure Monitor is a monitoring data pipeline for your Azure environment, and offers that data directly into Log Analytics as well as 3rd party tools where you can gain insight into that data and combine it with data from on premises or other cloud resources.
Application Insights – the Azure service that offers application performance monitoring and user analytics. It monitors the code you’ve written and applications you’ve deployed on Azure, on-premises, or other clouds. By instrumenting your application with the Application Insights SDK you can get access to a range of data including response times of dependencies, exception traces, debugging snapshots, and execution profiles. It provides powerful tools for analyzing this application telemetry while developing and operating your application. It deeply integrates with Visual Studio to enable you to get right to the problem line(s) of code so you can fix it, and offers usage analytics to analyze customer usage of your applications for product managers as well.
Log Analytics – is an Azure service that ingests log and metric data from Azure services (via Azure Monitor), Azure VMs, and on-premises or other cloud infrastructure and offers flexible log search and out-of-the box analytics on top of this data. It provides rich tools to analyze data across sources, allows complex queries across all logs, and can proactively alert on specified conditions. You can even collect custom data into its central repository so you can query and visualize it. You can also take advantage of Log Analytic’s built-in solutions to immediately gain insights into the security and functionality of your infrastructure.
Azure Monitor enables you to consume telemetry to gain visibility into the performance and health of your workloads on Azure. The most important type of Azure telemetry data is the metrics (also called performance counters) emitted by most Azure resources. Azure Monitor provides several ways to configure and consume these metrics for monitoring and troubleshooting.
Telemetry data is important
Because telemetry data is sending every minute, you get near to real-time monitoring of your data and/or your IT Solution.
There are three types of alerts off of data available from Azure Monitor — metric alerts, near real-time metric alerts (preview) and Activity Log alerts.
Metric alerts– This alert triggers when the value of a specified metric crosses a threshold that you assign. The alert generates a notification when the alert is “Activated” (when the threshold is crossed and the alert condition is met) as well as when it is “Resolved” (when the threshold is crossed again and the condition is no longer met)
Near real-time metric alerts (preview) – These alerts are similar to metric alerts but differ in a few ways. Firstly, as the name suggests these alerts can trigger in near real-time (as fast as 1 min). They also support monitoring multiple(currently two) metrics. The alert generates a notification when the alert is “Activated” (when the thresholds for each metric are crossed at the same time and the alert condition is met) as well as when it is “Resolved” (when at least one metric crosses the threshold again and the condition is no longer met).
Activity log alerts– A streaming log alert that triggers when an Activity Log event is generated that matches filter criteria that you have assigned. These alerts have only one state, “Activated,” since the alert engine simply applies the filter criteria to any new event. These alerts can be used to become notified when a new Service Health incident occurs or when a user or application performs an operation in your subscription, for example, “Delete virtual machine.”
Alerts overview
When you go to the Microsoft Azure Portaland click on the left side on Monitor you can start your Solutions and configure them.
Alerts are created by alert rules that automatically run log searches at regular intervals. If the results of the log search match particular criteria then an alert record is created. The rule can then automatically run one or more actions to proactively notify you of the alert or invoke another process. Different types of alert rules use different logic to perform this analysis.
In addition to creating an alert record in the Log Analytics repository, alerts can take the following actions.
Email. Send an email to proactively notify you of a detected issue.
Runbook. An alert in Log Analytics can start a runbook in Azure Automation. This is typically done to attempt to correct the detected issue. The runbook can be started in the cloud in the case of an issue in Azure or another cloud, or it could be started on a local agent for an issue on a physical or virtual machine.
Webhook. An alert can start a webhook and pass it data from the results of the log search. This allows integration with external services such as an alternate alerting system, or it may attempt to take corrective action for an external web site.
Monitoring your IT Solutions is really important for your Application Life Cycle management to get feedback for improvements and to get Customer satisfaction.
With Microsoft Monitoring from the Cloud with Azure and OMS you get more inside information via telemetry and log analytics to keep you Up-To-Date of
your IT Hybrid Infrastructure. Modern Hybrid Cloud Datacenter(s) need a Modern Secure Monitoring environment to keep yourself and your business in Control all the time in this rapidly fast changing IT World. Monitoring via the Microsoft Cloud gives you :
More Security information, Alerts and Advice to prevent security leaks
Application improvements in your Life Cycle management
Automation of action plans on Events.
The Health of your IT Hybrid Cloud Services
Makes troubleshooting much easier with Diagnostics logs
Integration with on-premises IT Infrastructures
OMS assessments, like Active Directory, SQL, Upgrades, Malware, Security & Audits………… and More
Great Dashboards for DevOps, IT Administrators, IT Managers, or for your Customers.
Cloud and Datacenter Management Blog 