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Now,

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what is Azure Monitor VM insights all about? Insights, again, has been a

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really nice engineering trend in Azure Resource Manager. Insights, in

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general, are curated monitoring views for specific Azure resources and

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workloads. They use what's called the workbook model.

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These are interactive web pages that include different,

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supposedly user friendly,

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I guess they are once you reach your initial

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learning curve. To quote my UK friends, it's a bit fiddly,

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at least getting started with it.

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Ultimately, the workbooks are in JSON,

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so if you want to get under the hood, you just could go

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straight to JSON instead of working within the graphical

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user interface in Azure Monitor.

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But at any rate, enough about that. Get off your soapbox, Tim. The neat

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thing about these workbooks and these insights is they answer the

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question that many customers have, look, I don't know what's important

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for me to look at with my Azure VMs, can you help? And yes,

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that's why these are curated experiences that you then can modify or just

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leave as is. Now, all of these insights, including VM insights, require a

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Log Analytics workspace, and you need to onboard those virtual machines into

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the VM insights solution, all right? This solution reports on Windows and

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Linux machines in a hybrid, multi‑cloud environment.

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No surprise there.

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And more recently, as of summer 2022, there's deeper visibility into the

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health of the guest operating system on those VMs.

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However, again, as of this recording in summer 2022,

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the guest health extension is in public preview and is available

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only for Azure VMs, not off‑cloud VMs yet.

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Eventually, I'm pretty sure that off‑cloud VMs will be supported, but not yet.

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If you've never seen Azure Monitor workbooks, this is what the

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design surface looks like in Azure Monitor.

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I want to draw your attention down to the bottom there where

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I'm adding in. In a region on the page, you can bring in a metric,

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you can bring in a log search query, and then there's a number of

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pre‑built visualization types that you can use.

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Again,

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you don't have to create these workbooks from scratch. The built‑in ones in

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the different insights modules include pre‑configured views that Microsoft

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has found most helpful to their customers.

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So it's a way for hybrid cloud administrators to get effective really

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quickly in doing monitoring, all right? This is an example of the Azure

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key metrics workbook. And as you can see,

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it uses these different visualizations where we can see at

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a glance all of our VMs, in this case,

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within my Azure sponsorship subscription. And we can see

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different visualizations to show CPU utilization, historical CPU disk network storage metrics.