Azure Series : Log analytics introduction

Introduction

Log analytics is part of Azure Monitor and it is a log collection of different services. You need to set up a workspace (You can setup multiple workspaces). In this blogpost I'll setup diagnostic settings for a VM and see if we can use log analytics for some analysis.

There are a couple of resources available for monitoring and newly are added continuously as you can see below.

Setting up diagnostic settings of a VM

At first, we cannot use diagnostics because the VM is not turned on. So, we need to turn the VM on.

Now, first start the VM in order to enable diagnostic settings.

And now we can enable diagnostic settings in the VM and we can use it in Azure monitor.

This will take some time. I had to refresh the window because it kept on saying "busy"..These are the standard settings of the diagnostic settings.

 What to log more? These are some of the other options.

Some more tabs are available but will not go into detail for now. But let's move on to the Azure Monitor Log analytics. Now, we can see that the VM is monitored and used in the Azure Monitor

Some of the Storage accounts are being monitored too.

Now let's try some log analytics queries.  First setup the scope for log analytics.

And now we can write some log analytics queries. Here are some simple log analytics query to retrieve the perf counters of the Computer "azhennievm".

Here is another example where I've gather the logs of 2 minutes ago until now.

I tried some examples of the Microsoft docs.

Resources

Some great resources I found so far about log analytics:

• Marc Kean
• github

Final thoughts

This tool can be used for monitoring your Azure resources and it is mostly used in administrative tasks in Azure.

Hennie