You can use Azure Monitor for virtual machines (VMs) to observe performance, diagnostic, and dependency information for Windows Server Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) virtual machines.
Scenario
Contoso is a mid-sized financial services company based in London, with a branch in New York. Most of its IT environment runs on-premises on Windows Server, including virtualized workloads on Windows Server 2016 hosts. The Contoso IT team is migrating servers to Windows Server 2025.
The Contoso IT director has noticed that the operational model is outdated, with limited automation and reliance on legacy technologies. The Contoso IT engineering team has started exploring Azure capabilities. They want to determine whether Azure services can help modernize the current operational model through automation and virtualization.
As part of the initial design, the Contoso IT team has asked you, as the lead systems engineer and server administrator, to set up a proof-of-concept environment. This environment should verify whether Azure services can help modernize the IT infrastructure and meet business objectives.
As the lead systems engineer, you’ve also been asked to research how to consolidate and analyze event log data from Windows Server IaaS virtual machines. They also want you to configure a task to run in Azure when a specific event is written to an event log on a Windows Server IaaS VM.
This module covers enabling Azure Monitor for virtual machines and how to activate it. It also explains how to use Azure Monitor to collect data in a hybrid environment and how to use it to monitor virtual machines. Finally, you’ll learn how to integrate Azure Monitor with Operations Manager.
By the end of this module, you will be able to:
- Enable Azure Monitor for virtual machines
- Monitor an Azure virtual machine with Azure Monitor
- Enable Azure Monitor in hybrid scenarios
- Collect data from a Windows computer in a hybrid environment
- Integrate Azure Monitor with Microsoft Operations Manager
Prerequisites
To get the most out of this module, you should have knowledge and experience in the following areas:
- Managing the Windows Server operating system and Windows Server workloads in on-premises scenarios, including AD DS, DNS, DFS, Microsoft Hyper-V, and file and storage services
- Common Windows Server management tools
- Core Microsoft compute, storage, networking, and virtualization technologies
- On-premises Windows Server-based resiliency technologies for compute and storage
- Implementing and managing IaaS services in Azure
- Microsoft Entra ID
- Security-related technologies such as firewalls, encryption, and multi-factor authentication
- Windows PowerShell scripting
- Automation and monitoring
