Being able to take advantage of a centralized and effective service for the management of Alerts of your infrastructure is definitely an important and fundamental part of the monitor strategy. For this purpose Microsoft has introduced a new experience in the management of the Alerts through Azure Monitor. This article will present how to evolve the management of Alerts in Log Analytics and what are the benefits introduced by this change.
In Log Analytics there is the ability to generate Alerts when, in the research that is done with scheduled frequency in the OMS repository, you will get the results that match with the criteria established. When an Alert is generated in Log Analytics you can configure the following actions:
- Email notification.
- Invocation of a webhook.
- Running a runbook of Azure Automation.
- IT Service Management activities (requires the presence of the connector for the ITSM solution).
Figure 1 – Alerts in Log Analytics
Until now, this type of configuration has been managed from the OMS portal.
Azure Monitor is a service that allows you to monitor all Azure borne resources, and it holds the "alerting" engine for the entire cloud platform. By accessing the service from the Azure portal you will have available, in a unique location, all Alerts of your infrastructure, from Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Application Insights. You can then take advantage of a unified experience both with regard to the consultation of the Alerts that for its authoring.
At present the Alerts created in Log Analytics are already listed in the Azure Monitor dashboard, but any change involves accessing to the OMS portal. To facilitate this management Microsoft has therefore decided to extend the Alerts in Log Analytics from the OMS portal to the Azure Portal. This process will be done automatically starting from 23 April 2018, will not result in any change to the configuration of Alerts and related queries, and it does not foresee any downtime for its implementation.
It follows that, after this operation, any actions associated with the Alerts will be made through Action Groups, which will be created automatically by the extension process.
The extension of Log Analytics Alerts in the Azure Portal, besides the advantage of being able to manage them from a single portal, allows you to take advantage of the following benefits:
- There is no longer the limit of 250 Alerts.
- You have the ability to manage, enumerate and display not only the Alerts of Log Analytics, but also those from other sources.
- You have greater flexibility in the actions that can be undertaken against a Alerts, thanks to the use of Action Groups, such as the ability to send SMS or voice call.
If you don't want to wait for the automatic process you can force the migration via API or from the portal OMS, according to the steps later documented:
Figure 2 - Starting the "Extend into Azure" process from the OMS portal
Figure 3 – Step 1: view the details of the extension process.
Figure 4 – Step 2: summary of the proposed changes
Figure 5 – Step 3: confirmation of the extension process
Specifying an email address you can be notified at the end of the migration process, that contains the summary report.
Figure 6 - Notification of the planned extension of the Alerts
During the process of extension of Log Analytics Alerts on Azure you will not be able to make changes to existing and creating new Alerts Alerts shall be made from Azure Monitor.
At the end of the extension process the Alerts will be visible even from the OMS portal and you will receive notification via email, to the address specified during the migration wizard:
Figure 7 – Email notification at the end of the extension process
From the Azure portal, in the section “Monitor – Alerts”, you will have a full management of Log Analytics Alerts:
Figure 8 - Example of modifying an Alert Rule from the Azure Monitor
The extension of the Alerts of Log Analytics in Azure Monitor does not involve costs, but you should be aware that, the use of Azure Alerts generated by Log Analytics query, is not subject to billing only if it falls within the limits and under the conditions reported in the page of Azure Monitor costs.
Conclusions
Thanks to this activity of extension of Log Analytics Alerts, Azure Monitor is confirmed that it is the new management engine of all Alerts, by providing to the administrators a simple and intuitive interface and enriching the possible actions of a notification alert.
