I guess all of you have seen the dashboards in Azure, the first page when login to the Azure portal. In some case, there are some resources that you by mistake pin while deploying, and in some case, it is just blank. In this blog post, I would like to share how to build a simple server health dashboard with basic performance data from servers (CPU workload, free disk space, and free memory). To set up this we need to do three main tasks

1. Connect Data sources to get data into Log Analytics
2. Configure queries to collect the needed data
3. Pin dashboard/view to Azure Dashboard

Connect Data Sources

If your servers are Azure virtual machines you can read some performance data (see image) direct from the VM using the Azure VM agent, but unfortunately nothing about free memory, CPU or free disk space.

To collect the required data we need to install an agent inside the OS. Azure Log Analytic (often called OMS) provides features for collect data and from different sources. Log Analytic also provide features around visualize and analyze the collected data.

In Log Analytics we first need to install the agent on all servers, more information about that here. Once all servers are connected to the workspace the next step is to start collection performance data. You can enable specific performance counters under Advanced settings / Data / Windows Performance Counters or Linux Performance Counters. In the image, it is Windows Performance Counters shown, but of course, you can also do this with Linux Performance Counters too. It is the same steps for Linux servers, install the agent and then enable performance counters.

In this example, we will add the following performance counters, and configure sample interval for every 10 seconds.

• Memory(*)\Available MBytes
• LogicalDisk(*)\Free Megabyte
• LogicalDisk(*)\% Free Space
• Processor(_Total)\% Processor Time

Building Queries

Next step is to configure queries to visualize the collected data. There are a lot of good information about building queries and working with performance data here and here. But to save you some time you can use the following queries as a foundation,

These queries show the average for each minute (1minutes), based on the data we collect every 10 seconds.

Disk, % Free Space. This query will show % free space on each logical disk that has an instance name that contains “:” (this filter out, for example, mount points volumes on DPM servers).

Perf | where ObjectName == “LogicalDisk” and CounterName == “% Free Space” | where InstanceName contains “:” | summarize FreeSpaceP = avg(CounterValue) by bin(TimeGenerated, 1minutes), CounterPath| sort by TimeGenerated desc | render timechart

Disk, Free Megabytes

Perf | where ObjectName == “LogicalDisk” and CounterName == “Free Megabytes” | where InstanceName contains “:” | summarize FreeSpaceMb = avg(CounterValue) by bin(TimeGenerated, 1minutes), CounterPath| sort by TimeGenerated desc | render timechart

Memory, Available MBytes

Perf | where ( ObjectName == “Memory” ) | where ( CounterName == “Available MBytes” ) | summarize FreeMemMb = avg(CounterValue) by bin(TimeGenerated, 1minutes), CounterPath| sort by TimeGenerated desc | render timechart

Processor, % Processor Time

Perf | where ( ObjectName == “Processor” ) | where ( CounterName == “% Processor Time” ) | where ( InstanceName == “_Total” ) | summarize CPU= avg(CounterValue) by bin(TimeGenerated, 1minutes), CounterPath| sort by TimeGenerated desc | render timechat

It can take some time before the first data is collected. If you don’t see any data when you run the queries, take another cup of coffee and try again a bit later 😊

Building a view

We now have all data sources connected and queries to visualize the data. The next step is to build views in Log Analytics. This is not requirements to build an Azure Dashboard but is nice to have.

Log Analytics View Design is a feature that we can use to build custom views. These views can later be pinned to the Azure Dashboard.  To save you some time you can download “Contoso Example Log Analytics Dashboard” (Contoso Servers) and import into View Designer.

Pin tiles to the Azure Dashboard – Log Analytics tile

There are two ways to pin a tile to the Azure dashboard that we will look at. The first one is to right-click a tile in Log Analytics and select pin to the dashboard. You can see this process in the following two images. On the Azure Dashboard you will see the view tile from the Log Analytics solution, if you click it you will go into Log Analytics and the specific solution. In this example, you can’t see processor, memory or disk performance direct on the Azure Dashboard.

Pin tiles to the Azure Dashboard – Advanced Analytics

The second alternative is to pin charts directly from the Advanced Analytics portal inside of Log Analytics. The Advanced Analytics feature provides advanced functionality not available in the Log Search portal, for example, Smart Analytics. In Log Analytics, click Analytics, to open up the Advanced Analytics portal. In the advanced analytics portal run the queries from this blog post, and click “Pin” on the right side. Once the different charts/queries are pinned to the Azure dashboard you can select them, click Edit, and change title and description on them.

Disclaimer: Cloud is very fast-moving target. It means that by the time you’re reading this post everything described here could have been changed completely.
Note that this is provided “AS-IS” with no warranties at all. This is not a production ready solution for your production environment, just an idea and an example.