In Microsoft Azure, you can see all your resources in Azure Portal and monitor them using Azure Monitor
Now you can do the same with your Azure Stack HCI resource
and monitor multiple Azure Stack HCI clusters together using Azure Monitor Insights solution
We are targeting three key benefits with Azure Stack HCI Insights
"Managed by Azure": which means it is always up-to-date,
it will be available from Azure Monitor Insights
and it does not require database or third party software setup
"highly scalable": The visualizations will be able to load more than 400 clusters across all Azure subscriptions
within a tenant at a time, with no boundary limitations on the cluster, domain, and physical location
It will be customizable by the user
which means the users don’t have to wait on the Microsoft product team to update any of the queries or visualizations
As a user, we will have to do 3 easy steps to get here
Register the clusters
Enable Log Analytics Extension
And finally enable Monitoring
Together these services will allow us to monitor all our clusters from Azure monitor Insights
Let me show you
To start this demo I have an empty resource group in Azure
you can see there are no resources to display
Meanwhile on-premises I have a 3 node Azure Stack HCI cluster
Let's go ahead and follow the steps to register this cluster to Azure in my resource group and subscription
The registration completed successfully
Now back in Azure, we can see our Azure Stack HCI resource in our specified resource group
And under the nodes tab, I see all my cluster nodes, arc enabled by default
And just by registration, all my cluster nodes are fully arc-enabled
providing powerful management capabilities like monitoring
Azure policy
extensions and more
Now to enable Logs extension we will require a log analytic workspace
I created one in our resource group
this is where the log data will be stored when we enable monitoring
Now let's configure the Logs extension
Here we will select our log analytic workspace, and click Add
After a moment, you will find that the logs are configured
and the agent that will collect the logs is configured on all the nodes of the cluster
And because our cluster is arc enabled
the system will automatically handle add, remove and replace node workflows
to support scale in and out scenarios
To prove that let's add another node to our on-premises Azure Stack HCi cluster
After a moment back in Azure, the new node shows up and is arc enabled
And the extension is automatically added to this node
Now let's configure monitoring
Once it is configured the logs will start getting collected in the log analytic workspace
After a while, the monitoring tab will provide information about what is going on with the cluster
it shows health alerts, the health of drives, virtual machines, and volumes
And it also provides CPU, memory, and storage usage charts
After finishing all the 3 steps Azure knows which Azure Stack HCI clusters are registered
and has log analytic extension and monitoring enabled
Now from Azure monitor, you can find the option for Azure Stack HCI Insights
to monitor multiple clusters across subscriptions
This view will always stay up to date with the latest changes and will be managed by Azure
The "Get Started" tab informs about the pre-requisites to use this insight
Provides the number of registered clusters that have logs and monitoring capability enabled
And provides the list of unmonitored clusters
The time range filter allows you to select, a range, for trend view, by default it is set to 24 hours
The subscription filter shows the subscriptions that have registered HCI clusters
You can select multiple subscriptions in this filter
The HCI cluster filter shows the registered clusters that have logs and monitoring capability enabled
The overview tab provides the health and usage information about the cluster and associated nodes
The views can load information about more than 400 clusters at a time, you can always refine these views using filters
At first glance itself, I know that all my clusters are healthy
The grid view provides more detailed information
and on expansion, I can see the node health information as well
I can further interact to navigate to the cluster resource page and view the per cluster monitoring view
Or I can navigate to arc for server resource page
The Virtual machines tab: provides the state information of the VMs running on the HCI cluster
and its distribution across the nodes
In the storage tab, we can see the volume health
usage, and the IOPS, throughput, and average latency trend information
We can also see the drive health status from this tab
Now in the cluster performance tab for the selected time range
we can see the CPU usage trend, Average Volume latency, volume IOPS and volume throughput trend
If you are interested in seeing the information about just one cluster select the cluster name from the legend
These views are customizable by the user, let's change one of the graphs to a bar graph
Its fairly easy to change the views, and the user can modify the queries as well
Now, these customized views can be saved as a workbook
Let's save it in our resource group
Here is our resource. Let's quickly verify our changes
Anyone who has access to this subscription and resource group can access this customized workbook
That’s just a quick look at what we can do using Azure Stack HCI Insights
For more up-to-date information please visit this URL. Thank You