Microsoft Azure AZ-801 — Section 17: Monitor Windows Server by using Windows Server tools and Azure services Part 2

102. Monitor servers by using Windows Admin Center

Let’s talk about monitoring a server or multiple servers for that matter, using the Windows Admin Center.

So, here I am on NYC-SVR1, which I had installed the Windows Admin Center earlier. I can open up my web browser and go to NYC-SVR1.exam practice.com which is going to bring me here and I can click on whichever server I want.

So, I’m going to click on NYC-SVR1 that’s going to connect me into the interface for it and I can scroll down. And one thing you can do, which I’m not doing in this video, but you can connect this to Azure, monitor and connect it in your cloud service. And from there you can set up Azure Alerts and all of that stuff if you want as well. That can link back to this. But I’m going to scroll down here. I’m going to click on Performance Monitor. All right. And then from there I can click to create a what’s called a blank workspace, which can save this information. That’s what a workspace is going to do for you. So, we’ll click on Blank Workspace and we’ll click Add counter. All right. And so from there, it’s going to be able to detect which objects are available for me to monitor. So, I’ll just drop this down. We’ll scroll down. And you’re going to see a lot of the same exact monitors you would if you were inside. Performance monitor. Right. So, a lot of the same types of stuff here. All right. Let’s just go down to… It’s lagging just a little bit on me here, but we’ll take a look at the processor as soon as it’s done loading. All right.

So, there’s a processor. We can select, we’ll say all processors and then what do we want to monitor? So, maybe, we want to look at the percent processor time. So, we’ll select that. And just like we have on our performance monitor, you can see that it is now monitoring down here and giving you some information what the processor is currently doing. You can view it based on a report, a line diagram. You can do it based on minimum max or you can also do a heat map. All right. You can get an idea of what’s going on with your processor. You can. You can also add other counters so you can have more than just that single counter go in at a time. The other thing you can do is you can save it all.

So, I could save this workspace if I want. Give it a name. Just call it processor, say workspace. And I can always go back into it whenever I want. You can also download the workspace if you want, so it tells you it’s going to save it as a JSON file. And then you could import that into another Windows Admin Center or something like that if you ever wanted to. And there’s also some settings here. Where you can configure the time range you want from 5 minutes, 15 minutes, an hour, 6 hours. It takes a sample every second. It uses standard color schemes or you can also switch it to high contrast and then you can adjust the font size as well.

So, those are your settings, not really a lot of settings, but ultimately it’s pretty it’s a pretty easy little system to use. I would say it’s probably even easier than performance monitor. Pretty-pretty straightforward as far as being able to monitor your servers. And again, what’s great about Windows admin Centers, if you were if you if you link this into Azure and all that stuff, you could also be monitoring Azure virtual machines with it as well. All right. Although I’ll also tell you and I might have said this before, Microsoft is sort of trying to move away from the Windows Admin Center and they’re starting to move purely into monitoring stuff with Azure.

So, instead of using the Admin Center, they’re wanting you to start moving into monitoring stuff with Azure. But if you were still just like a fully on-premises environment and you weren’t really dealing with Azure, this is still going to be a handy tool for monitoring your servers across the board.

103. Monitor by using System Insights

Let’s talk about a feature now in server that we have called System Insights.

Now, System Insights is a predictive analysis based system, and the idea is that it has the ability to gather data over time and provide some predictive insights for us to let us know certain things. For example, as time goes on, if our CPU is being overloaded by performance because we keep adding more and more and more, it tracks this over time. If we’re running out of disk space, it’s going to track that over time and predict and tell us, okay, you’re going to run out of disk space in the in the near future. And so the idea of this is to try to give us information, to let us know ahead of time that something’s going to happen. And this means that we don’t necessarily have to sit down and monitor performance monitor for days on end because we’ll have this system in place that’s going to give us some insight of what is going to happen in the future.

So, here we are on my server or NYC-SVR1 and I’m going to open up Server Manager. I’m going to go to manage add roles and features. Next, next, next. And next we’ll go down to this. This being a feature, we’re going to look for system insights. So, there it is right there. We’re going to click Add feature and we’re going to click Next. And we’re going to click Install. All right. So, we’ll let that install. I’ll go ahead and pause recording while that’s happening. All right.

That’s done, I’m going to hit Close and I am going to allow the server to reboot, even though it doesn’t call for a reboot. I like to do this for system insights just to be safe. All right, now that my server has rebooted and again, it doesn’t call for reboot, it’s just for safety. I like to do that just to make sure that all the services are properly started up here. I am going to go to PowerShell, so I’m just going to right click start and I’m going to go to Windows PowerShell and then I’m just going to type cd\ and clear the screen. All right.

Now, from there what we’ll do is we’re just going to look at what our options are for insights.

 So, we’re going to type get-insight capability. And you can see and this is what you really want to remember here, there are four different types of insight that server comes with right out of the gates here. The first is CPU capacity forecasting.

So, again, the goal here is this analytic system is going to be watching your CPU capacity. And as time goes on, if we’re adding more services or taking away services, it’s tracking all that to try to decide if at some point we’re going to max out our CPU usage, utilizing some of the different roles and things we’re doing. The second thing is networking capacity forecasting.

So, this is watching our network adapter or multiple network adapters that we have on our system, and it’s going to be analyzing to see if we’re pushing our network adapters to their limits using some sort of input output services that we’ve got traffic flowing in and out of the adapters. It’s going to watch that over time and it’s going to be able to give us insight on whether or not we’re going to max that out. And then the last two are both related to storage.

So, you’ll see that we have one that says total storage consumption forecasting, and this is just monitoring all of our local drives. And it’s going to be watching to see over time how fast we’re filling up our drives. This would especially be helpful in a situation where, you know, you’re, maybe, you’re using a drive for backup, you’re backing data up every weekend or something like that. And you’re not really keeping an eye on your drives. Well, this will keep an eye on for you and let you know, hey, you’re going to run out of space here in the next couple of weeks based on how fast you’re consuming information or consuming space on that drive. The last is a volume consumption forecasting.

So, this is looking at individual volumes as opposed to just the entire hard drive. This is for individual volumes. All right. So, that is pretty much the way that our different those are the four different methods that we have insights with that we can look at. All right. All right.

What else do we have involving insights? Well, my first recommendation is it’s a little easier to work with insights inside the integrated scripting environment. So, I’m going to type ESI and that is going to bring us into the integrated scripting environment.

Once we get into the integrated scripting environment and close out of what I’ve got open here, I can let’s just let’s run that same command let’s look at what our capabilities are again. So, we’ll just say get-insight capability, right? So if we hit play on that, you can see the same for and it is important to know the two know the names you’ll notice the state of each one of these is already online.

In other words, this is already turned on. The problem is this takes time before you’re going to start noticing anything. In fact, I would say 24 hours. So, if, like you’re wanting it to really start showing you things like the volume and all that, try copying a bunch of data to your disk and all of that, then you’ll finally start to gather information or gather some insight over a 24-hour period. But the other thing you’ll notice that all four of these are turned on. They’re all enabled. And so there is a command for enabling and disabling. So, you type enable-insight, capability name and then whichever one of these you want to enable.

For example, I could say CPU capacity forecasting. All right. And that’s going to enable that one, right? So hit Play on that. There you go. It’s already enabled, right? Well, if I wanted to disable. Right. Let’s just run this one line this time. All right. At that point, you’re now disabling that insight. All right. And of course, it does use the more this you’ve got running the actual more memory this is going to take up.

So, let’s now hit Play on that. And you can see that this one is disabled. All right. Let’s turn it back on, though, because we really do want it to be turned on. So, we’ll just go ahead and turn that on and. It may take a moment. There it goes. So, now it’s turned. It’s now officially turned on.

Now, if you want to invoke one of these immediately to go ahead and run and retrieve predictions, then there is a command called Invoke. So, we’ll switch the verb here from enable to the word invoke. And that is going to go ahead and say, give me prediction information. All right. So, we’ll go ahead and run that. And as you can see, unfortunately, there isn’t any, right? Because I haven’t really gathered any over time. I just installed it. So, there isn’t really anything special there for it to get. Now, over time, there will be. And so if you’re playing around with this, I encourage you to give this some time and come back to it, maybe, 24 hours of doing stuff on your server and then run it again. The other thing that’s nice though, is there is a command called Git Insights capability results -name. Put in the name of the one you want. And you can actually go back and see past information.

Once something’s been invoked, you can see the recent information for that by hitting Play. So, most recently, it’s the CPU capacity forecast at CPU usage is forecast to remain within the available capacity.

So, right now it’s saying that there isn’t really much to see. Everything is pretty much remaining the same. All right. And so that’s how that’s how you would grab that information. All right. It’s not really a whole lot here as far as to look at. But over time, you will be able to grab information from this. All right.

Now, we’ll say that if you begin looking at the status and you get some status codes, there are some different status codes that can that can pop up depending upon what’s going on and the nun status. As you can see here, means there isn’t really any information. You could see a OC message, which means it has started collecting information and everything is okay. You could see a warning message, which means there is something out of the ordinary. It’s noticing. You could see a critical message which is indicating that the capacity of something is a critical usage. CPU is it critical? Networking is critical, storage is it critical? Or you can see an error which means something is not working right? It could be that something’s not working right. It’s not able to collect information or something like that.

So, again, there is for different messages, which means everything is okay. Warning, which means something’s out of the ordinary critical, which means the performance is at a critical level, which is not good, an error, which obviously means something is not working right. And then of course, none means it hasn’t really been able to collect any real data yet. And those are your different status messages that you’ll see right there. These are also stored inside the event viewer.

So, if you view your event viewer, you can look at the system log and you can see some of these messages show up in the system log. And generally the event numbers for each one of these is going to be event number 1 to 2. You really don’t need to memorize these event numbers. I’m just letting you know what they’ll be warning is one is event 148 critical is event 150 error is going to be event 149 and then none means it’s just event 132 So those are the event numbers that are associated with this. All right.

So, anyway, that is system Insights. I encourage you to try that out, but give it some time, like turn it on and then, maybe, the next day or two come back and then and then go ahead and invoke like I’m doing here. If you’re doing this on your own server now, if you’re not doing on your own server, no problem. Again, there isn’t really too much here you need to stress over or worry about or know. Just know what system insights are and know that there’s the four different ones here. That’s the most important thing I would know out of this whole thing. Know what system insights are and then notice and know what the four different insight options objects that you basically can gather insight from. All right. And that would be my recommendation for understanding insights.