With the latest release of WhatsUp Gold, we've addedcloud performance monitoring and the ability to track virtual resource usage, so that you always know how much you're spending on cloud services such as Azure and AWS. In this video from Ipswitch contributor Adam Bertram, we'll cover how to use WhatsUp Gold 2018 to monitor Azure VMs.
https://youtu.be/NAlN4dce3HE
Big thanks to Adam Bertram's awesome new site, TechSnips, for the video. TechSnips is a new (and totally free) is an IT career development platform that offers video how-to's on dozens of IT technologies and techniques. Adam and co. have covered tons of technologies, like cloud computing, programming, system administration, and a whole lot more. Check it out!
About Adam:
Adam Bertram is a 20-year veteran of IT. He’s an automation engineer, blogger, consultant, freelance writer, Pluralsight course author, and a Microsoft Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP. Adam focuses on DevOps, system management, and automation technologies as well as various cloud platforms mostly in the Microsoft space. Catch up on Adam’s articles at adamtheautomator.com or follow him on GitHub or Twitter at @adbertram.
Transcript:
Hello, in this Snip we're going to talk about how to monitor Azure virtual machines with Ipswitch’s WhatsUp Gold 2018.
Before we start there are a few prereqs you should know about. First, we do need an Azure VM, obviously, since we're going to be monitoring it. Secondly, you will need a service principle setup on Azure. WhatsUp Gold does not allow you to use a username and a password to authenticate in Azure, so you do need to get that service principle set up, and you do need the azure credentials already added to WUG . So there's a few things that you should know how to do there.
To get more information I suggest you check out the How to Setup a Monitor for an Azure Virtual Machine in Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold 2018. That’s a Snip that I created earlier that should give you all the information that you need to get the service principle set up and set up the azure credentials for you to actually authenticate to Azure.
Alright so with that said, let's get started. First thing we need to do is verify that we have those credentials added. You do need those credentials. So let’s go up here to settings and then go to the library then we go to credentials and then you can see that I have my Azure credentials already added here if we go into edit you can see that we have the information already needed in there.
Alright, so now that we have the credentials let's go ahead and discover all the Azure virtual machines that we have. To do that we go over here to discover and I'll go up to new scan and then since I'm going to be only discovering Azure virtual machines we aren't going to need to scan any IP addresses. So I will go ahead and just uncheck all of this, and we have to leave this checked here we will not be doing an IP address scan, but we do need to—we do have to leave that because it doesn't give us an option to actually disable it. To scan Azure and AWS instances we have to click on cloud devices here and since I'm going to be doing Azure, I will go ahead and click Azure, and then this is where I provide my credentials.
I'll click on my credentials here and then I will choose the Azure credentials that I created earlier, and I could click on schedule and schedule this discovery to run every now and then, and then finally we have the summary and we could save this by providing the name and description but for now I'm not going to do that I'm just going to do a one-time discovery.
Alright, so once I'm done I hit run and then it asks me to save the scan setting—I don't really want to do that, so I will just click on no, just run and then the discovery starts. You will see there in the lower left-hand corner that we have one active scan running, and you'll start seeing the devices pop up.
Alright, it looks like we have the Azure cloud portal. When WhatsUp Gold does its discovery, it creates a cloud portal for each one, so you'll see Azure, AWS, whatever the cloud you're monitoring it shows a portal object and then underneath those portal objects is where the actual instances will come up.
Alright, it looks like it did find my Azure instances, my LABDC virtual machine, once we discover it now we can set up a monitor on it. To do, once we're in the discovery map here we just click on the Azure virtual machine and then you click on start monitoring. Alright, select devices to monitor, I'm just going to go ahead and put it in my discover devices I could put in whatever I want here in the group. And here we can select the devices to monitor as you see I'm just monitoring my LABDC, just the one device that I found and I will go ahead click on start. WhatsUp Gold knows that the instance is an Azure so it will go ahead and set up some default monitors, which I will show you here in a minute.
Alright, so it looks like it says my LABDC is down. Alright, so that may be a problem. We can dive into this a little bit more and we can see that the resource group is adbtesting. Alright, so let's go ahead and I will bring this up in the background here and then we can see if it shows that it is coming up. Alright, I have brought up my Azure virtual machine in the background and notice that it is green and honestly that was extremely quick. I started it as soon as I got the notification in the Azure portal that was on, the monitor here all the sudden turned green.
To show you some of the monitors that it sets up by default, I can go into a little bit more detail here. Now I can see that it is in my network, so you'll see that all of the graphs will show up and populate, so very similar concept. To see the actual monitors I have to go over to my dashboard here and go to dashboard and then I can also go to device status and then I can pick which device that I want to see here and I would just go ahead and pick my LABDC and then go over here to my monitoring section. And then now you can kind of get an overall glimpse of the status, there's a lot of different views that you can see, and there's a lot of different things that we can do with this but since this Snip is just getting it on-boarded, this gives the device status you gives a great overview of what it does. Notice that we have it set up the cloud resource monitor so it's set that up automatically at this point you can add as many different monitors as you want to it. You can get the history, the performance counters, anything you want at this point. But this is just how we can get an Azure virtual machine onboarded in WhatsUp Gold 2018.