Leon Welicki: Hello there. Thank you very much for joining
us today in this new Azure Portal How To Video. Today,
we learn all about Azure activity logs. And for that, we have
Anna Pfoertsch, who’s going to teach about it. So, thank you
very much for joining us, Anna.
Anna: Yep, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited
to walk you through activity log and let you know how to
access it and what you can use it for.
Leon: Look forward to that.
Anna: So, activity log is really great to tell the who, what,
and when for operations in your Azure resources. There’s
a range of data that you can look at in your activity log
from Azure Resource Manager operation logs to updates
in your service health events. So, there’s different ways
where you can get to activity log. One is by going to
all services over here. And then you can find activity log,
favorite it, and it’ll show up in your navigation bar. You can
also go to monitor and select activity log from the table
of contents on the left. Or you could simply go to a resource,
such as this VM right here, where you will also find activity
log in your table of contents. So, I’m going to go ahead and
click on this. And the advantage of going to a resource and
then clicking on activity log is that all your filters will
already be prefiltered down to that particular resource.
So, you can see here subscription, resource group, and
the resource name are already set to this particular VM.
If I wanted to change these filters, however, I can easily
edit what’s already here or click on add filter, and then
select a filter type that I would like, such as operation,
and then I can select a particular operation. Let’s say,
create role assignment in this case. Click that, select, and
then it will filter down to only show create role assignment
events. If I don’t really have time to play around with the
filters, or I would like to see everything at a quick glance,
I could click on this quick insights button, which will open
a panel of premade filters that are filtered by things like
errors, alerts fired, or role assignments even. It’ll show
you the number of everything that’s happened in the past
24 hours too.
So, I’d like to talk a little bit more about how you can get
more out of the events shown in your activity log. You
can see here on these particular logs, I have an arrow to the
left of this. This means that these logs are grouped together
by correlation ID and then sorted in chronological order.
I can also get some more information out of my logs by
editing the columns of this table, which I can do in this top
left button, and then by selecting whatever columns I would
like to see or would like not to see.
Another way I can see more information is by clicking on
a particular log, which will open the more info panel. And this
will show me a lot more detail about my log and will even
allow me to drill down into the JSON where I can see
everything at the most granular level.
From this more info panel, I can also add an activity log
alert or create a new support request.
So, activity log is really great because it enables you to
see your events happening on every resource that you
have. So, I’m in a VM right now, but I could just as easily
be let’s say in a web app where you can see activity log
here as well. Or, I could also be in a storage account where,
again, you can find activity log in the same place. Not
only that, I can also click on the container that these
resources are contained in, and this container itself will
also have activity logs in its ToC, so, in the left most
panel on the table of contents. And here, instead of having
the filters being filtered down to the most granular resource
level, I’m only filtered down to the resource group. So, I
will see all the events that are happening in that resource
group to those resources in there as well.
Leon: That’s really great. And one thing that I notice is the
activity log is always in a consistent location, right?
Anna: Exactly.
Leon: It’s always the second item in every resource type
on Azure.
Anna: Yep.
Leon: So, that functionality’s available throughout the
entire platform, right?
Anna: Yeah, exactly.
Leon: It’s great.
Anna: Cool.
Leon: So, thank you very much, Anna, for showing us
all of this. It’s really great. And thanks, every one of you
for watching. If you have comments, leave a comment in
the comment section below. Follow us on Twitter. And look
forward seeing you the next video. Thank you very much.