In previous chapters, you learned how to make your applications highly available and route customers from around the world to globally distributed instances of your application. One goal was to minimize the amount of interaction with your application infrastructure and let the Azure platform manage health and performance for you. Sometimes, you still need to roll up your sleeves and review diagnostics or performance metrics. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to review boot diagnostics for a VM, monitor performance metrics, and troubleshoot connectivity issues with Network Watcher.
With web apps, you deploy your code and let the Azure platform handle the rest. In chapter 3, we looked at the basics of troubleshooting and diagnosing problems with web app deployments. You learned how to see real-time application events to monitor performance. When you work with VMs in the cloud, it’s often hard to troubleshoot a problem when you can’t physically see the computer screen, the way you can get web app diagnostics.
One of the most common issues with VMs is lack of connectivity. If you can’t SSH or RDP to a VM, how can you troubleshoot what’s wrong? One of the first things you may want to check is whether the VM is running correctly. To help, Azure provides VM boot diagnostics that include boot logs and a screenshot of the console.