Support for monitoring and automation of Azure VM Scale Sets and Service Fabric

In April of 2016, Microsoft released Azure VM Scale Sets (VMSS).  Referred by many, as the successor to Azure Cloud Services, VMSS service provides management of multiple ubiquitous load-balanced Virtual Machines as a single logical unit.  This is especially useful for compute workloads, such as worker pools or web farms comprised of multiple servers doing the same type of work.  VMSS is the underlying service behind Azure Service Fabric and Azure Batch.  Effectively, it is becoming the core way for organizations to deploy scalable compute resources into Azure.

Effective immediately, Netreo now supports native monitoring and automation of Azure VMSS.  During the setup stage (Setup Wizard), Netreo will now detect any available Azure VM Scale Sets services. After resource discovery is complete, Netreo will automatically instrument selected VMSS services with a default diagnostic setup and update all instances in the VM Scale Set to capture diagnostic information (updating of instances is done one-at-a-time if Auto Updating is not turned in VMSS itself)

Here are the core benefits

• Using Netreo users can easily track any performance indicators for their VMs in Azure, add/change the diagnostic setup without redeployment.  Essentially, any Windows performance counters or Event logs can be tracked and monitored without the need to understand or manually configure complex Diagnostic Extensions
• Setup sophisticated auto-scaling for VMSS instances based on any signal that Netreo is capable of tracking.  Such signals can be queue depths, requests/sec load, CPU utilization, custom data retrieved from SQL Azure, time of day, and much more.  Auto-scaling rules are easily setup in Netreo’s UI
• Auto-recycle every instance once per day to keep the whole set clean and working optimally.  Rebooting of instances is done one-at-a-time to ensure that VM Scale Set does not experience outages
• Auto-reboot VMs in a Scale Set if their available memory drops below a certain threshold

Netreo provides default monitoring setups for VMSS.  Useful metrics are captured out of the gate, and auto-daily-recycle and auto-low-memory-reboots automation actions are pre-setup but are not enabled by default.

Test drive Netreo monitoring and automation today. Request a demo today.

Note: at this time, only Windows-based VM Scale Sets are supported.

Find out how Netreo can help with all Azure monitoring needs. Request a Demo Today