Rename- Azure VM

This post i am writing after the issue faced during the DR set-up & now you might be wondering how come DR set up is connected to the caption. Well it is and let me explain you how.

During the time of DR set up , ASR was showing the VM to enable to replication but it was showing Grayed out and you can not choose it or select it. I followed my own article on this scenario but still unable to fix then i dig it further and found all VMs are created from disk except this one which was created from Image. Below is the post on similar issues -

https://pachehra.blogspot.com/2019/08/vm-migration-between-regions-via-asr.html


All VM's where we could enable the replication without issue showing source as Disk because all VMs were migrated from On-prem via ASR. Only this VM showing image and also grayed out during DR set-up.

Now i tried to re-deploy the VM just to be sure as i have already followed mentioned in the above article of mine. This did not fix the issue but yes gave me the well defined error, which helped to figure out why source was image.

Hence my question to the tech who was working on the fail-over during migration regarding the Source being Image because i knew as per the error this VM was not generalized but created from the captured image of running VM. My only motive was just to know what was the reason that he needs to go through the Capture image and re-create the VM.


Guess what was the Answer -

May be you guessed right. He said needed to change the name on the VM as during migration he forgot to change the name and i was like - you dont need to capture to change the name , hence the caption and better way to do it.

Best way to change the name is - Delete  the VM and re-create from the left-over Disk , you do have option to create the VM  "easy-peasy"

So the essence of the story - Best way to change the Azure VM name is to delete the existing VM and create the VM from the left-over disk as shown in the Snippet.

Configure Alerts - Azure VM

Alert for the various state of Azure VM is something you will find people asking a lot & this blog to post we are focusing on the Azure Monitor or Azure Alert that you can configure for your Action group.

So, without making it any complex let’s make it absolutely simple and navigate to Azure VM >> Monitor >> Alerts (as shown below)

As you have seen the big red circle above, these are the options we need to play with. Lets hit the manage action groups and create the action group first.

Action Group = it’s a collection of notification preferences. Azure monitor and Service health alerts use action groups to notify users that an alert has been triggered.

In below snippet you can see what all options required to configure the Action group & you can also configure an action to notify a person by email or SMS, they receive a confirmation indication they have been added to the action group. 

We are taking the example of Email as notification preference and once I have added by mail , it took not more then 5 mins and received below email.

 

Now we have the action group in place lets create a rule for the alert , below Is the create alert rule plane with all the 4 circled options that we need to fill –

Resource = As shown in the below snippet, you can select the resource for which you want ton configure the alerts, here we are talking about the VM state hence we would select the Resource as the VM (ACI-VM)

Condition = It’s a condition or logic that we will define and once that condition matches alert would get triggered or notification would be sent. There are a lot of inbuilt conditions and we are choosing Deallocate Virtual Machine (Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines).

Action Group = We need to select the action group that we already discussed and created

Alert Details = Configure the name and description of your alert and Click on create rule , it would take approx. 5 mins and you are all set.

Now once condition matches as in my scenario when VM got shut down , I have got email as shown below -

Now you can navigate to Aure Monitor >> Alerts >> you can will dashboard and once you click on alerts, you will see all the alerts that fired -

There is one more option that makes it more interesting is Change state , once the support or action group take the action needed , he can navigate to that particular alert and change its state.