Monitoring Azure Site Recovery

In this blog post I will cover the monitoring capabilities of Azure Site Recovery. Specifically, we will answer the following questions:

1. How do I monitor the replication health of my protected virtual machines?
2. How do I check the status of my Jobs?
3. How do I monitor my virtual machines once they are failed over to Azure?

Monitoring Replication Health

Azure Site Recovery uses the Hyper-V Replica (HVR) replication technology to protect your Hyper-V virtual machines and their replication health can be monitored using one or more of the following.

Hyper-V Monitoring MP for SCOM

If you want to monitor replication health of your virtual machines through SCOM (2012 SP1 or higher), you should install the Hyper-V Monitoring management pack. This MP contains multiple monitors, alerts that can be used to generate email notifications.

Once the Hyper-V Monitoring management pack is installed, you will be able to:

1. View the replication health of protected virtual machines.
2. Identify cases where the replication is not optimal or interrupted and generate email notifications.
3. Identify issues with the Recovery Hyper-V Host (applicable for Replication between on-premises sites only).

My colleague Trinadh has written an excellent blog on this topic that provides step by step guidance on installing, configuring and using the Hyper-V Monitoring management pack.

If you have any feature suggestions for the management pack or would like to see an ASR management pack, let us know through the user voice forum.

Azure Site Recovery vault

The Virtual Machines view of Azure Site Recovery can be used to understand the currentReplication Status of a virtual machine. You can reach this view from ASR vault -> Protected Items -> Virtual Machines view as shown below.

Using the Virtual machines view, you can:

1. View the current Replication status of a virtual machine.
2. Use the Error details button to understand the detailed error message for Virtual machines with unhealthy replication status.
3. Trigger Resynchronize action on virtual machines which are in Re-sync required state.

For example, in the below screenshot, the Virtual machine scomdb is in a Suspended-Warning state.

If you want more monitoring capabilities like Email notifications need to be added to the ASR vault, let us know through the user voice forum.

Monitoring Job status

Azure Site Recovery tracks all user initiated, automated actions as “Jobs” and the Jobs view enables a rich drilldown. You can use the Jobs view of your ASR vault to,

1. View the Job history
2. Track the detailed step-by-step progress of your Job, including the time taken for each step
3. Understand the Job failures, warnings in detail
4. Restart failed Jobs
5. Export jobs as Excel files

Monitoring Virtual machines failed over to Azure

Once your virtual machines are failed over to Azure, you can use the following capabilities to monitor Virtual machines running in Azure.

System Center Management pack for Windows Azure

The System Center Management Pack for Windows Azure enables you to monitor the availability and performance of resources that are running on Windows Azure. The management pack runs on a specified resource pool and then uses various Windows Azure APIs to remotely discover and collect instrumentation information about a specified Windows Azure resource, such as a Cloud Service, Storage or Virtual Machine. You can follow the steps listed here to install and configure the Windows Azure management pack.

Things to consider:

• Monitoring is not enabled by default for a VM once it is failed over to Azure.
• Whenever a new set of Virtual machines are failed over from an on-premises site to Azure or from Azure to an on-premises site, you will have to “Edit the Monitoring object” created earlier in the Operations Console and add the newly failed over Azure virtual machines and remove the ones that do not need to be monitored.

Monitor view of the Azure virtual machine

You can use the Monitor view of an Azure virtual machine to understand its CPU usage, Disk IO and Network IO. The below screenshot is an example of the Monitor view.

Email notifications using Azure alerts

You can follow the steps listed here to create Alert rules and receive email notifications based on monitoring metrics like, CPU percentage of a virtual machine, Disk IO, Network IO.

That ends this blog post, but keep watching this space as we post more Azure Site Recovery tips & tricks.