Some exciting news to share with you today! As many of you may remember, back in May 2022, Microsoft launched Azure Monitor HCI Insights for public preview. And after incorporating valuable feedback from the customers during the preview phase, Azure Monitor HCI Insights is now generally available (GA)!
For those who haven’t heard before, what exactly is Azure Stack HCI Insights? Much like VM Insights, it’s a native, integrated service that provides you with comprehensive health, performance, and usage insights about your Azure Stack HCI clusters. With Azure Stack HCI Insights, you can conveniently monitor all your resources within the Azure portal.
Let’s take a look into some of the key benefits of using Azure Stack HCI Insights:
- Scalability: Azure Stack HCI Insights is highly scalable, allowing you to load more than 250 cluster information sets across multiple subscriptions simultaneously. There are no boundaries or limitations based on cluster, domain, or physical location.
- Customizability: The user experience is designed to be highly customizable. You can easily add, remove, or edit visualizations and queries within the Azure Monitor workbook templates. This flexibility ensures that you can tailor the monitoring experience to meet your specific requirements.
Now, let’s talk about what’s new in the GA version of Azure Monitor HCI Insights. HCI Insights now uses the enhanced Azure Monitor Agent and Data Collection Rules. These new features allow you to specify the event logs and performance counters that need to be collected, which are then stored in a Log Analytics workspace. Once the logs are collected, HCI Insights leverages Azure Monitor Workbooks to provide you with deeper insights into the health, performance, and usage of your clusters.
To get started quickly, there are some pre-defined workbook templates with default views. You can easily switch between different tabs such as Health, Servers, Virtual machines, and Storage. Each tab is carefully designed to provide the relevant data and metrics about your cluster. From health data like faults and resource status, to performance data including IOPS and throughput, and usage data such as CPU and memory usage, Azure Stack HCI Insights covers it all using the easy-to-understand visualizations.
These workbooks are also very customizable, and you can pin the specific ones to an Azure dashboard as well.
In conclusion, the General Availability of Azure Monitor HCI Insights introduces a powerful and integrated service that allows you to gain valuable insights into the health, performance, and usage of your Azure Stack HCI clusters. With improved performance, enhanced features, and the ability to customize the monitoring experience, Azure Stack HCI Insights is here to take your monitoring to the next level. I encourage you to give it a try!
For more details, you can find the official announcement by Microsoft here.