Tips & Tricks (Part 4): Azure VM Troubleshooting!

Here are some Tips & Tricks that will hopefully help you to get MORE out of Microsoft Azure.

In this article, I will be focusing on tips and tricks to easily detect and recover from common Virtual Machines issues. We will review detection and recovery steps using Virtual Machines serial console, boot diagnostics and other tools.

One of the disadvantages of using virtual machines (VMs) in the Azure cloud has been that if something goes wrong, for instance, a Windows Firewall rule is configured that blocks RDP access or the Remote Desktop service is stopped, it might be impossible to regain access to the VM. Unlike an on-premises Hyper-V Server, you don’t have physical access to the Azure cloud fabric.

Microsoft recently launched a preview of the Serial Console Recovery Tool, which provides text-based console access to Linux and Windows Server VMs via the COM1 serial port. 

I will write a spinoff article on the next-best-thing called Serial Console Access in coming weeks. 

Enable Azure VM boot diagnostics with Azure Portal or PowerShell to capture logs that can help you troubleshoot boot failures and obtain screenshots to see the VM's current state.

Support for two debugging features is now available in Azure: Console Output and Screenshot support for Azure virtual machines Resource Manager deployment model.

Both of these features are supported for Azure virtual machines in all regions. Note, screenshots, and output can take up to 10 minutes to appear in your storage account.

When bringing your own image to Azure or even booting one of the platform images, there can be many reasons why a virtual machine gets into a non-bootable state. These features enable you to easily diagnose and recover your virtual machines from boot failures.

The performance diagnostics tool helps you troubleshoot performance issues that can affect a Windows virtual machine (VM). Supported troubleshooting scenarios include quick checks on known issues and best practices, and complex problems that involve slow VM performance or high usage of CPU, disk space, or memory.

Performance diagnostics installs a VM extension that runs a diagnostics tool that is named PerfInsights.

Each performance diagnostics report may contain several insights and indicate an impact level of High, Medium, or Low. Each insight also contains recommendations to help lessen the concern. Insights are grouped for easy filtering.

Impact levels represent the potential for performance issues, based on factors such as misconfiguration, known problems, or issues that are reported by other users.

I am really excited to show you Azure VM Troubleshooting Tips and Tricks in part 4. I am planning to write many more bite-sized articles like this. Please have a look at other articles as well.

Please have a look at part 1 here - LINK

Please have a look at Part 2 here - LINK

Please have a look at Part 3 here - LINK

Cheers

Susanth