Monitor HCI clusters with Azure Stack HCI Insights (preview)

Customers have Azure Stack HCI deployed at the edge in industries like retail and manufacturing and at hundreds of locations. Hence, monitoring them centrally is essential for business continuity. We're excited to announce an update to Azure Stack HCI Insights (preview), including a new single cluster monitoring view to provide our customers beyond basic, static, and rigid information presentation.

Customers today use Azure Stack HCI Insights for gaining health, performance, and usage insights about Azure Stack HCI clusters that are connected to Azure and enrolled in monitoring. The cluster health service collects health performance and usage data and writes the data to event logs which is pushed to a Log Analytics workspace in Azure. To learn more about the event logs collected, visit Event Logs.  

The previous monitoring tab for an HCI cluster in Azure provided a simple static view of your cluster's health status as shown below: 

How does Azure Stack HCI Insights meet customers’ needs? 

The new, enhanced Azure Stack HCI Insights introduces Azure workbook functionality to provide deeper insights on the health, performance, and usage of their cluster. To learn more about Workbooks, visit Azure Monitor Workbooks. 

Below is a screenshot of an Azure workbook displayed for a single cluster. Pre-defined workbook templates exist with default views to give customers a head-start. Users can switch between different tabs like Health, Servers, Virtual machines, and Storage. Each tab provides data and metrics about the cluster which is carefully designed keeping our customers’ needs in mind. Health data such as faults, resource status, performance data like IOPS, throughput and usage data like CPU usage and memory usage is collected. Moreover, the rich visualizations make it easier to decipher the data and give a quick glance of useful insights. 

Workbooks provide a flexible canvas to analyze and visualize the data to fit the unique needs of your organization. It has a set of visualizations like charts, graphs, grids, honeycomb, composite bar, maps etc. Moreover, it is very convenient to modify and alter. It allows you to pin the graphs to Azure dashboards which gives a holistic view of resource health, performance, and usage. It has also become easier for our customers to share their data by downloading this information in Excel and deriving useful insights. 

Let us have a look at all the data that is collected. We are collecting health, performance and usage data. What has changed is the method of data collection. Earlier, this data was limited and took an hour to collect and update the logs to your Log Analytics workspace. With the improved Insights feature, health faults are collected every 5 minutes and performance metrics every 15 minutes. This has significantly reduced the data collection time and hence, your data is more updated and frequent. This makes sure that you can fix any issues as early as they are known. 

We have also added an additional resource group filter which allows you to select all the clusters within a resource group. When you navigate to monitor, you can view the health of your clusters for a specific resource vs all. 

Future plans 

This is just the beginning of Monitoring Insights for Azure Stack HCI. We plan to update the feature regularly with more functionality that will help you monitor your Azure Stack HCI clusters. If you have feedback, please send it to [email protected]! 

For more detailed information, please visit our documentation for Single Cluster Insights and Multiple Cluster Insights .