Monitoring Azure Stack Hub

Guest virtual machines on the HLH

Each Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub scale unit comes configured with robust monitoring and alerting capabilities. The Hardware Lifecycle Host (HLH) has enabled the Hyper-V role to host several guest virtual machines, as shown in the following figure, including:

• Management virtual machine: Hosting Dell EMC OpenManage Network Manager and Dell EMC SupportAssist Enterprise for automatic support-case creation for hardware alerts, and serving as the hardware manager during OEM extension updates
• OpenManage Enterprise: Monitoring and alerting of Dell EMC PowerEdge servers

Figure 5.              Monitoring Azure Stack Hub

Monitoring and alerting in scale nodes

The Health Resource Provider exposes the health and alerts for the Microsoft Azure Stack Hub software infrastructure components. The provider is viewable through the Azure Stack Administration Portal or programmatically using REST APIs and PowerShell. The following figure summarizes the monitoring and alerting system:

Figure 6.              Azure Stack Hub monitoring and alerting

Hardware alerts

There is a limited number of hardware alerts that are exposed through the Health Resource Provider. However, it complements the greater level of monitoring detail that OpenManage Enterprise provides for server hardware components.

The discovery of PowerEdge servers in OpenManage Enterprise occurs automatically during deployment. WS-MAN polls each of the server iDRACs for alerts and failures and forwards the SNMP traps to OpenManage Enterprise for tasks. The tasks are sent to SupportAssist Enterprise for automatic SR-ticket generation, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 7.              SupportAssist Enterprise

OpenManage Network Manager fulfills several critical functions in the Azure Stack Hub scale-node architecture, and uses SNMP and SYSLOG for switch monitoring. When hardware or configuration problems occur, OpenManage Network Manager generates alerts that are forwarded to OpenManage Enterprise for action. If required, an SR ticket is generated.

Other capabilities of OpenManage Network Manager are customer reports, performance monitoring, traffic-flow analysis, and firmware and compliance checking. These optional capabilities are not set up by default, but are available if needed. For instance, if you need a detailed report of the network switches, go to the Reports tab and create a detailed view of the switches, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 8.              Asset report from OpenManage Network Manager

The Health Resource Provider manages the Azure Stack Hub software infrastructure component health and alerts. The Region Management monitoring tile in the Azure Stack Administration Portal displays this information, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 9.              Alerts view in Azure Stack Administration Portal

Each alert displays details such as severity, state, created time, updated time, and description of the event, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 10.          Alert details

Prescriptive guidance on remediating each issue is provided through REST APIs and PowerShell.

The System Center Management Pack (SCOM) for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub enables you to monitor the availability of the Azure Stack Hub infrastructure. The management pack runs on a specified resource pool, and then uses various Azure Stack Hub APIs to remotely discover and collect instrumentation information, such as deployments, regions, and other resources.

For more information, see the white paper Monitoring Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack with System Center Operations Manager.
 

For more information from Microsoft, see Management Pack for Microsoft Azure Stack now available.

Note: There are numerous external monitoring options, including Splunk, Nagios, and other monitoring platforms. SCOM and Nagios can both be integrated into Azure Stack Hub.