Azure Monitor overview - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Azure Monitor overview

📖 Scenario: You are managing a small web application hosted on Azure. You want to set up basic monitoring to track the health and performance of your app.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple Azure Monitor setup that collects metrics and logs from a virtual machine and creates an alert rule for CPU usage.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a resource group named MonitorResourceGroup

Create a virtual machine named TestVM in the resource group

Enable Azure Monitor metrics collection on TestVM

Create an alert rule named HighCpuAlert for CPU usage over 80%

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Monitoring cloud resources is essential to keep applications healthy and performant. Azure Monitor helps track metrics and alerts to catch issues early.

💼 Career

Cloud engineers and DevOps professionals use Azure Monitor to maintain infrastructure reliability and respond to problems quickly.

1

Create a resource group and virtual machine

Write Azure CLI commands to create a resource group called MonitorResourceGroup in the eastus region and a virtual machine called TestVM inside it.

Azure

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use az group create to make the resource group and az vm create to make the VM.

2

Enable Azure Monitor metrics on the VM

Write an Azure CLI command to enable monitoring metrics collection on the virtual machine TestVM in the resource group MonitorResourceGroup.

Azure

az group create --name MonitorResourceGroup --location eastus
az vm create --resource-group MonitorResourceGroup --name TestVM --image UbuntuLTS --admin-username azureuser --generate-ssh-keys
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use az monitor metrics alert create with the VM's resource ID to enable metrics monitoring.

3

Create an alert rule for high CPU usage

Write an Azure CLI command to create an alert rule named HighCpuAlert in the resource group MonitorResourceGroup that triggers when the average CPU usage of TestVM is greater than 80%.

Azure

az group create --name MonitorResourceGroup --location eastus
az vm create --resource-group MonitorResourceGroup --name TestVM --image UbuntuLTS --admin-username azureuser --generate-ssh-keys
az monitor metrics alert create --name EnableMetrics --resource-group MonitorResourceGroup --scopes $(az vm show --resource-group MonitorResourceGroup --name TestVM --query id -o tsv) --condition "avg Percentage CPU > 0" --description "Enable metrics collection"
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use az monitor metrics alert create with condition avg Percentage CPU > 80 for the alert.

4

Verify the alert rule configuration

Write an Azure CLI command to show the details of the alert rule named HighCpuAlert in the resource group MonitorResourceGroup.

Azure

az group create --name MonitorResourceGroup --location eastus
az vm create --resource-group MonitorResourceGroup --name TestVM --image UbuntuLTS --admin-username azureuser --generate-ssh-keys
az monitor metrics alert create --name EnableMetrics --resource-group MonitorResourceGroup --scopes $(az vm show --resource-group MonitorResourceGroup --name TestVM --query id -o tsv) --condition "avg Percentage CPU > 0" --description "Enable metrics collection"
az monitor metrics alert create --name HighCpuAlert --resource-group MonitorResourceGroup --scopes $(az vm show --resource-group MonitorResourceGroup --name TestVM --query id -o tsv) --condition "avg Percentage CPU > 80" --description "Alert for high CPU usage"
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use az monitor metrics alert show with the alert name and resource group to view details.