Announcing General Availability: Azure Change Tracking & Inventory using Azure Monitor agent (AMA)

We are excited to announce the general availability to configure Azure Change Tracking & Inventory using the Azure Monitor agent (AMA)

The Change Tracking and Inventory service tracks changes to Files, Registry, Software, Services and Daemons and uses the MMA (Microsoft Monitoring Agent)/OMS (Operations Management Suite) agent.

What's New?

Migration experience – Now you can move existing VMs on Change Tracking & Inventory with LA agent to the latest version of the service. There are two supported methods to execute this –

• Migration from Azure Portal – Supports limited VMs at a time & restricted to Azure VMs. Click here to know details.
• Migrate Using PowerShell scripts – Click here to know details.

GA Updates - 

This GA version of the service uses the new AMA agent for data collection and enhances the following experience:

• Security/Reliability and Scale - The Azure Monitor Agent enhances security, reliability, and facilitates multi-homing experience to store data.
• Simplified onboarding- You can onboard to Virtual Machines directly to Change Tracking (add link) without needing to configure an Automation account. In new experience, there is standardization of management from one central workspace. You can transition from Log Analytics (LA) to AMA so that all VMs point to a single workspace for data collection and maintenance.
• Autonomous Rules management – Uses Data Collection Rules to configure or customize various aspects of data collection. For example, you can change the frequency of data collection for supported data types within a particular Log Analytics Workspace. DCRs let you configure data collection for specific machines connected to a workspace as compared to the "all or nothing" approach of legacy agents.

At a functional level, GA version of this service with AMA has parity experience with the previous version of Change Tracking & Inventory (with LA agent) and further equips you with the following capability –

• At Scale Onboarding via Azure Policy – Change Tracking with AMA has 3 variants of Azure Policies to onboard at resource group level. The 3 policies are for – Azure Virtual Machines, Arc-enabled Virtual Machines & Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS)

How to get started?

Onboarding Experience

You can onboard to Change Tracking & Inventory with AMA either via Azure Portal or by using Azury Policy (to onboard at scale). To onboard single VM via portal, click on specific VM name from Virtual Machines -> Change Tracking -> Enable using AMA agent. To know more about the various methods to enable Change Tracking, click here

Onboarding from Single VM view

Onboarding via DINE Policies (at scale onboarding)

Migration Scenario (Via Azure Portal)

1. From Virtual Machines page (for single VM migration) – Select “Change Tracking” from left TOC & click on “Configure with AMA” to initiate migration process. Click here to know more.

2.  From an Automation Account (for multi-VM migration) – Click on “Configure with AMA” on the landing page of Automation Account à “Change Tracking” from left TOC. Click here to execute the end-to-end migration here.

You can check out our complete documentation to get more details. We’d love to hear what you like and don’t like about this feature, and where you’d like us to take it. Use the below experience to share the feedback –