A common question in data center migration scenarios is dependencies between servers. Service Map can be very valuable in this scenario, visualizing TCP communication between processes on different servers.

Even if Service Map provides a great value we often hear a couple of questions, for example, visualize data for more than one hour and include more resources/servers in one image. Today this is not possible with the current feature set. But all the data needed is in the Log Analytics workspace, and we can access the data through the REST API 🙂

In this blog post, we want to show you how to visualize this data in Visio. We have built a PowerShell script that export data from the Log Analytics workspace and then builds a Visio drawing based on the information. The PowerShell script connects to Log Analytics, runs a query and saves the result in a text file. The query in our example lists all connections inbound and outbound for a server last week. The PowerShell script then reads the text file and for each connection, it draws it in the Visio file.

In the image below you see an example of the output in Visio. The example in the example we ran the script for a domain controller with a large number of connected servers, most likely more than the average server in a LOB application. In the example you can also see that for all connections to Azure services, we replace the server icon with a cloud icon.

Of course, you can use any query you want and visualize the data any way you want in Visio. Maybe you want to use different server shapes depending on communication type, or maybe you want to make some connections red if they have transferred a large about data.

In the PowerShell script, you can see that we use server_m.vssx and networklocations.vssx stencil files to find servers and cloud icons. These files and included in the Microsoft Visio installation. For more information about the PowerShell module used, please see VisioBot3000.

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