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--- title: Azure VM Watch description: Learn how to use the Azure VM watch service offering. author: iamwilliew ms.author: wwilliams ms.service: azure-virtual-machines ms.topic: concept-article ms.update-cycle: 1095-days ms.date: 02/18/2025 # Customer intent: "As a system administrator, I want to implement VM watch for my virtual machines, so that I can monitor their health efficiently and prevent potential issues with minimal resource impact." --- # VM watch: Enhancing VM health monitoring (preview) VM watch is a standardized, lightweight, and adaptable service offering for virtual machines (VMs) and virtual machine scale sets. It runs health checks within a VM at configurable intervals and sends the results via a uniform data model to Azure. The AI operations (AIOps) engines for production monitoring in Azure consume these health results for regression detection and prevention. VM watch is delivered via the [Application Health VM extension](/azure/virtual-machines/extensions/health-extension?tabs=rest-api) to provide ease of deployment and manageability for customers. In addition, VM watch is offered at no extra cost. ## Monitoring specifics for VM watch - **Ease of adoption**: VM watch is available through the [Application Health VM extension](/azure/virtual-machines/extensions/health-extension?tabs=rest-api). - **Flexible deployment**: You can enable VM watch by using an Azure Resource Manager template (ARM template), PowerShell, or the Azure CLI. - **Compatibility**: VM watch operates seamlessly in both Linux and Windows environments. It's suitable for individual VMs and virtual machine scale sets alike. - **Resource governance**: VM watch provides efficient monitoring without affecting system performance. Resource caps on the CPU and memory utilization of the VM watch process help protect VMs. - **Out-of-the-box readiness**: VM watch comes equipped with a suite of default tests that you can configure for your scenarios. ### VM watch Memory Constraints To maintain consistent performance across different virtual machine (VM) configurations, **VM watch** enforces memory usage limits according to the VM SKU's total available memory. The memory caps are adjusted dynamically based on the VM's memory tier. | **VM Memory Range** | **VM watch Memory Cap** | |:---:|:---:| | Less than 8 GB | 80MB | | 8 GB to 16 GB | 200MB | | Greater than 16 GB | 400MB | ### Network | **Signal name** | **Type** | **Description** | |:---:|:---:|:---:| | **Outbound connectivity** | Check | Verify the network outbound connectivity from the Azure VM. | | **DNS Resolution** | Check | Verify if one or more DNS names can be resolved. | | **TCPSynRetransmits (Linux Only)** | Metric | The number of times the system retransmits a TCP SYN and SYN/ACK packet before giving up on establishing a connection.| | **SegmentsRetransmitted** | Metric | The number of transmitted TCP segments that contain one or more previously transmitted octets. | | **NormalizedSegmentsRetransmitted** | Metric | **SegmentsRetransmitted** / (**SegmentsSent** + **SegmentsRetransmitted**) | | **ConnectionResets** | Metric | The number of times that TCP connections made a direct transition to the `CLOSED` state from either the `ESTABLISHED` state or the `CLOSE_WAIT` state. | | **NormalizedConnectionResets** | Metric | The percentage of connections that were reset during the last measurement interval. | | **FailedConnectionAttempts** | Metric |The number of times that TCP connections made a direct transition to the `CLOSED` state from either the `SYN_SENT` state or the `SYN_RCVD` state. | | **NormalizedFailedConnectionAttempts** | Metric | **FailedConnectionAttempts** / (**ActiveConnectionOpenings** + **PassiveConnectionOpenings**) | | **ActiveConnectionOpenings** | Metric | The number of times that TCP connections made a direct transition to the `SYN_SENT` state from the `CLOSED` state. | | **PassiveConnectionOpenings** | Metric | The number of times that TCP connections made a direct transition to the `SYN_RCVD` state from the `LISTEN` state. | | **CurrentConnections** | Metric | The number of connections established. | | **SegmentsReceived** | Metric | The number of segments received, including segments received in error. | | **SegmentsSent** | Metric | The number of segments sent, including segments on current connections but excluding segments that contain only retransmitted octets. | ### Disk | **Signal name** | **Type** | **Description** | |:---:|:---:|:---:| | **Azure Disk I/O** | Check | Verify file creation, write, and read. Delete operations on each drive mounted to the VM. | | **FreeSpaceInBytes** | Metric | The free disk space of the target mount point. | | **UsedSpaceInBytes** | Metric | The used disk space of the target mount point. | | **CapacityInBytes** | Metric | The disk space capacity of the target mount point. | | **UsedPercent** | Metric | The percentage of used disk space for the target mount point. | | **WriteOps** | Metric | The write operations per second for the target disk/partition. | | **ReadOps** | Metric | The read operations per second for the target disk/partition. | ### CPU | **Signal name** | **Type** | **Description** | |:---:|:---:|:---:| | **ProcessCPUCoreUsage** | Metric | An instantaneous measurement of the percentage of a single CPU core that the target process is using (100 = 100%, a whole core). | | **ProcessCPUMachineUsage** | Metric | The percentage of the machine's total CPU that this process is using. | | **MachineTotalCpuUsage** | Metric | The VM's total instantaneous CPU utilization. | ### Memory | **Signal name** | **Type** | **Description** | |:---:|:---:|:---:| | **ProcessRSSPercent** | Metric | **Process RSS** / (**Machine Total Memory** * **100%**) | | **ProcessPageFaults** | Metric | The number of page faults since the process started. | | **MachineMemoryTotalInBytes** | Metric | The VM's total Memory in Bytes. | | **MachineMemoryUsedPercent** | Metric | **Machine Used Memory** / (**Machine Total Memory** * **100%**) | | **TotalPageFaults** | Metric | The total number of page faults for all running processes since they started. | ### Process | **Signal name** | **Type** | **Description** | |:---:|:---:|:---:| | **Process Creation** | Check | Start a lightweight process to validate that process creation is possible. | | **Running Process(es)** | Check | Verify if the target process or processes are running. | | **UpTime** | Metric | How long the target process has been up and running since the last process startup. | ### IMDS | **Signal name** | **Type** | **Description** | |:---:|:---:|:---:| | **IMDS** | Check | Verify that the user can reach an Azure Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) endpoint from within the VM. VM information is returned from the IMDS endpoint query. | ### Clock | **Signal name** | **Type** | **Description** | |:---:|:---:|:---:| | **Clock Skew** | Check | Verify the clock skew between the remote Network Time Protocol (NTP) server and the Azure VM. For a Windows VM, fall back to check if the Windows Time service is synced with `w32tm` if the remote NTP server is inaccessible. | ### OS | **Signal name** | **Type** | **Description** | |:---:|:---:|:---:| | **System Errors** | Metric | Collect the number of errors from the system-level event log (Windows only) where the SystemData <=2 (including LOG_ALWAYS, Critical, Error). The measurementTarget is defined as the Source_EventId of the EventLog using default Windows locale. Each collection is limited to more than 10 different measurement targets. | ### azblob | **Signal name** | **Type** | **Description** | |:---:|:---:|:---:| | **Azure Storage blob connectivity** | Check | Verify the connectivity to the Azure Storage blob and download the blob by using MSI or a shared access signature (SAS) token. | ### Hardware | **Signal name** | **Type** | **Description** | |:---:|:---:|:---:| | **Hardware Health Monitor** | EventLog | Collect hardware health info from the Windows event log. Currently, only disk-related critical events are collected, including events with ID 7, 500, 504, 505, 512, and 549. | | **Hardware Health Nvidia Smi** | EventLog | Collect GPU stats including memory and GPU usage, temp and others by running nvidia-smi command (Linux Ubuntu only) | ## Related content - [VM watch Collectors Suite](/azure/virtual-machines/vm-watch-collector-suite) - [Install VM watch](install-vm-watch.md) - [Configure VM watch](/azure/virtual-machines/configure-vm-watch) - [Configure Event Hubs for VM watch](/azure/virtual-machines/configure-eventhub-vm-watch)