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VM watch is a standardized, lightweight, and adaptable service offering for virtual machines (VMs) and virtual machine scale sets. It runs health checks within a VM at configurable intervals and sends the results via a uniform data model to Azure. The AI operations (AIOps) engines for production monitoring in Azure consume these health results for regression detection and prevention.
VM watch is delivered via the Application Health VM extension to provide ease of deployment and manageability for customers. In addition, VM watch is offered at no extra cost.
Monitoring specifics for VM watch
- Ease of adoption: VM watch is available through the Application Health VM extension.
- Flexible deployment: You can enable VM watch by using an Azure Resource Manager template (ARM template), PowerShell, or the Azure CLI.
- Compatibility: VM watch operates seamlessly in both Linux and Windows environments. It's suitable for individual VMs and virtual machine scale sets alike.
- Resource governance: VM watch provides efficient monitoring without affecting system performance. Resource caps on the CPU and memory utilization of the VM watch process help protect VMs.
- Out-of-the-box readiness: VM watch comes equipped with a suite of default tests that you can configure for your scenarios.
VM watch Memory Constraints
To maintain consistent performance across different virtual machine (VM) configurations, VM watch enforces memory usage limits according to the VM SKU's total available memory. The memory caps are adjusted dynamically based on the VM's memory tier.
| VM Memory Range | VM watch Memory Cap |
|---|---|
| Less than 8 GB | 80MB |
| 8 GB to 16 GB | 200MB |
| Greater than 16 GB | 400MB |
Network
| Signal name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Outbound connectivity | Check | Verify the network outbound connectivity from the Azure VM. |
| DNS Resolution | Check | Verify if one or more DNS names can be resolved. |
| TCPSynRetransmits (Linux Only) | Metric | The number of times the system retransmits a TCP SYN and SYN/ACK packet before giving up on establishing a connection. |
| SegmentsRetransmitted | Metric | The number of transmitted TCP segments that contain one or more previously transmitted octets. |
| NormalizedSegmentsRetransmitted | Metric | SegmentsRetransmitted / (SegmentsSent + SegmentsRetransmitted) |
| ConnectionResets | Metric | The number of times that TCP connections made a direct transition to the CLOSED state from either the ESTABLISHED state or the CLOSE_WAIT state. |
| NormalizedConnectionResets | Metric | The percentage of connections that were reset during the last measurement interval. |
| FailedConnectionAttempts | Metric | The number of times that TCP connections made a direct transition to the CLOSED state from either the SYN_SENT state or the SYN_RCVD state. |
| NormalizedFailedConnectionAttempts | Metric | FailedConnectionAttempts / (ActiveConnectionOpenings + PassiveConnectionOpenings) |
| ActiveConnectionOpenings | Metric | The number of times that TCP connections made a direct transition to the SYN_SENT state from the CLOSED state. |
| PassiveConnectionOpenings | Metric | The number of times that TCP connections made a direct transition to the SYN_RCVD state from the LISTEN state. |
| CurrentConnections | Metric | The number of connections established. |
| SegmentsReceived | Metric | The number of segments received, including segments received in error. |
| SegmentsSent | Metric | The number of segments sent, including segments on current connections but excluding segments that contain only retransmitted octets. |
Disk
| Signal name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Azure Disk I/O | Check | Verify file creation, write, and read. Delete operations on each drive mounted to the VM. |
| FreeSpaceInBytes | Metric | The free disk space of the target mount point. |
| UsedSpaceInBytes | Metric | The used disk space of the target mount point. |
| CapacityInBytes | Metric | The disk space capacity of the target mount point. |
| UsedPercent | Metric | The percentage of used disk space for the target mount point. |
| WriteOps | Metric | The write operations per second for the target disk/partition. |
| ReadOps | Metric | The read operations per second for the target disk/partition. |
CPU
| Signal name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| ProcessCPUCoreUsage | Metric | An instantaneous measurement of the percentage of a single CPU core that the target process is using (100 = 100%, a whole core). |
| ProcessCPUMachineUsage | Metric | The percentage of the machine's total CPU that this process is using. |
| MachineTotalCpuUsage | Metric | The VM's total instantaneous CPU utilization. |
Memory
| Signal name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| ProcessRSSPercent | Metric | Process RSS / (Machine Total Memory * 100%) |
| ProcessPageFaults | Metric | The number of page faults since the process started. |
| MachineMemoryTotalInBytes | Metric | The VM's total Memory in Bytes. |
| MachineMemoryUsedPercent | Metric | Machine Used Memory / (Machine Total Memory * 100%) |
| TotalPageFaults | Metric | The total number of page faults for all running processes since they started. |
Process
| Signal name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Process Creation | Check | Start a lightweight process to validate that process creation is possible. |
| Running Process(es) | Check | Verify if the target process or processes are running. |
| UpTime | Metric | How long the target process has been up and running since the last process startup. |
IMDS
| Signal name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| IMDS | Check | Verify that the user can reach an Azure Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) endpoint from within the VM. VM information is returned from the IMDS endpoint query. |
Clock
| Signal name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Clock Skew | Check | Verify the clock skew between the remote Network Time Protocol (NTP) server and the Azure VM. For a Windows VM, fall back to check if the Windows Time service is synced with w32tm if the remote NTP server is inaccessible. |
OS
| Signal name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| System Errors | Metric | Collect the number of errors from the system-level event log (Windows only) where the SystemData <=2 (including LOG_ALWAYS, Critical, Error). The measurementTarget is defined as the Source_EventId of the EventLog using default Windows locale. Each collection is limited to more than 10 different measurement targets. |
azblob
| Signal name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Azure Storage blob connectivity | Check | Verify the connectivity to the Azure Storage blob and download the blob by using MSI or a shared access signature (SAS) token. |
Hardware
| Signal name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware Health Monitor | EventLog | Collect hardware health info from the Windows event log. Currently, only disk-related critical events are collected, including events with ID 7, 500, 504, 505, 512, and 549. |
| Hardware Health Nvidia Smi | EventLog | Collect GPU stats including memory and GPU usage, temp and others by running nvidia-smi command (Linux Ubuntu only) |