Geneos

Azure Monitor Integration User Guide

Overview

The Azure Monitor integration enables you to retrieve all metrics and logs available in your Azure Monitor setup and display them as dataviews in Geneos.

The integration provides a Gateway configuration file that enables monitoring of Azure Monitor through a set of pre-configured Toolkit samplers. You can query and list the available metrics for your environment and running instances.

This guide walks you through the integration process to get the Toolkit sampler running with default Azure Monitor views.

Audience

This user guide is intended for experienced Geneos users who want to set up and configure an integration between Geneos and Azure Monitor.

As a user, you should be familiar with Azure Monitor, as well as Python.

Prerequisites

The following requirements must be met prior to the installation and setup of the template:

  • Python 3.6 or higher.
  • Python package manager (pip).
  • Access keys from your Azure web console:
    • appId
    • password
    • tenant
    • subscription ID
  • This requires an additional licence to use. Please contact your ITRS Account Manager for more information.

Installation procedure

The Azure Monitor integration is largely pre-configured and involves three primary steps:

  1. Download the integration files from the resources site.
  2. Load the integration file in the Gateway Setup Editor.
  3. Associate the samplers with a managed entity.

Note: The include files are intended to be read-only and should not be edited (unless the integration specifically requires for them to be modified). This is because include files can be shared between a few instances of a Gateway and best practice is to share them in their default state. It is also to make the upgrades and maintenance process of the integration files easier. All configuration should be carried out in your local Gateway files instead.

Download the integration files

  1. Download the integration package geneos-integration-azure-<version>.zip from the ITRS Downloads site.
  2. As a best practice, save the files on the same machine where your Gateway is running.

The integration package includes a number of files. These are the files that determine the integration setup:

  • include/azureMonitoring.xml — Gateway configuration file (also called an include file) containing Toolkit samplers configured for Azure Monitor integration.
  • scripts/list_VMs.py — Python script that calls each VM directly and returns a JSON format. The JSON values are then processed in a CSV format and displayed in Active Console. This displays available metrics for your services
  • scripts/requirements.txt — list of the required Azure libraries. They can be installed by running the pip command against this requirements file:
    $ pip install -r requirements.txt

Load the integration files

To load the integration files into the Gateway Setup Editor, follow these steps:

  1. Open Gateway Setup Editor.
  2. In the Navigation panel, click Includes to create a new file.
  3. Enter the location of the file to include in the Location field. In this example, it is the include/azureMonitoring.xml.
  4. Update the Priority field. This can be any value except 1. If you input a priority of 1, the Gateway Setup Editor will return an error.
  5. Expand the file location in the Include section.
  6. Select Click to load.
  7. Click Yes to load the new include file.

    8. Azure Monitor Installation - Include Location

Success: Gateway configuration now appears in the Includes section.

For more information on the dataviews associated with the Azure Monitor integration, see the Azure Monitor Integration Technical Reference.

Associate the samplers with a managed entity

After you have loaded the configuration file, the Azure Monitor samplers become available for use. These samplers are associated with a pre-defined Type. To associate the samplers with a managed entity, follow these steps:

  1. In the Gateway Setup Editor, create a new managed entity by right-clicking the Managed entities folder.
  2. Under the Basic tab for the new managed entity, add a pre-configured AZURE type.
  3. Specify the environment associated with the samplers. By default, this is AZURE.
  4. Apply the managed entity to the running Netprobe.
  5. Click the Validate button to check your configuration and save if everything is correct.

    6. Azure Monitor Installation - Managed Entity

Success: After you save your changes to the managed entity, the Azure Monitor dataviews appear under the managed entity on the state tree.

For more information about include files, see the 'Include' files in Gateway Setup Editor.

Environment configuration

The default environment configuration is created by the azureMonitoring.xml script. You can create a new environment based on the default one and modify the environment variables according to your system.

Note: Standard variable scoping rules apply when variable reference is used in include files. Please take note of that when creating your own variables. For more information, see Variable Scoping and Resolution in User Variables and Environments.

For more information on the environment variables used in this integration, see the Environment variables.

Further reading

After you have included the monitoring samplers, you can learn about its dataviews and environment configuration in the Azure Monitor Integration Technical Reference.