What is Azure Stack HCI monitoring?

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Applies to: Azure Stack HCI, version 23H2

This article provides an overview of Azure Stack HCI monitoring.

Monitoring Azure Stack HCI involves the regular collection and analysis of data from all components of your system to promptly identify and address any potential issues. Routine monitoring is crucial for maintaining the health and functionality of your Azure Stack HCI system.

To understand the current performance patterns, identify performance anomalies, and develop methods to address issues, it's important to set baseline performance metrics for your system under different times and load conditions.

Azure Stack HCI utilizes Azure Monitor tools, such as Insights, Metrics, Logs, Workbooks, and Alerts. These tools help collect data, analyze, and proactively respond to consistent or trending variances from your established baseline.

High-level architecture

Broadly, the architecture of Azure Stack HCI monitoring comprises the following key components:

  • Deploying extensions to collect log, metrics, telemetry, and alerts.
  • Using Azure Monitor tools, such as Insights, Metrics, Logs, Workbooks, and Alerts to analyze, visualize, and respond to the data effectively.

The following diagram is an architectural representation of Azure Stack HCI monitoring implementation.

High-level architecture diagram of Azure Stack HCI monitoring. This diagram shows an Azure Stack HCI cluster with three cluster nodes. Each cluster node is installed with extensions for monitoring.

Monitoring capabilities in Azure Stack HCI

This section describes the monitoring capabilities in Azure Stack HCI.

Insights

Insights is a feature of Azure Monitor that quickly gets you started monitoring your Azure Stack HCI cluster using logs. You can use Insights to monitor either a single Azure Stack HCI cluster or multiple clusters simultaneously. Insights for Azure Stack HCI collects data in the form of logs using Azure Monitor Agent and then stores the data in a Log Analytics workspace. It uses the Kusto Query Language (KQL) to query the Log Analytics workspace, and the results are visualized using Azure Workbooks. To learn about using Insights to monitor a single or multiple clusters, see Monitor a single cluster with Insights or Monitor multiple clusters with Insights.

With Insights for Azure Stack HCI, you get access to default workbooks with basic metrics, along with specialized workbooks created for monitoring key features of Azure Stack HCI. To learn more about these feature workbooks, see Monitor HCI features with Insights.

Metrics

Azure Stack HCI enables you to store numeric data from your clusters in a dedicated time-series database. This data is collected using Telemetry and Diagnostics Arc extension and then analyzed using Metrics Explorer. To learn more about Metrics, see Monitor Azure Stack HCI with Azure Monitor Metrics.

Alerts

Alerts proactively notify you when important conditions are found in your monitoring data. They allow you to identify and address issues before the users of your system notice them. The response could be a text or email to an administrator, or an automated process that attempts to correct an error condition. You can alert on any metric or log data collected from your Azure Stack HCI system.

For more information on alerting, see What are Azure Monitor alerts?

Types of alerts

The following table provides a brief description and setup instructions for each alert type in Azure Stack HCI:

Alert type Description How to configure
Health alerts These are system-generated alerts and have no additional cost. You don’t need to set up Log Analytics or manually create any alert rules. See Configure health alerts for Azure Stack HCI.
Log based alerts These are customer-defined alerts that are used to perform advanced logic operations on your log data. These alerts allow you to use Log Analytics query to evaluate resource logs at a predefined frequency. See Set up log alerts for Azure Stack HCI.
Metric based alerts These are customer-defined alerts that are used to evaluate metrics of your Azure Stack HCI system at regular intervals. Metric alerts are useful when you want to be alerted about data that requires little or no manipulation. See Set up metric alerts for Azure Stack HCI.
Recommended alerts These are predefined metric-based alerts for your Azure Stack HCI cluster resource. These alerts provide you with initial monitoring for a common set of metrics including CPU percentage and available memory. See Enable recommended alert rules for Azure Stack HCI.

Next steps