Tutorial: Enable recommended alerts for an Azure virtual machine

Once you have enabled enhanced monitoring for a virtual machine, you should enable alerts to get notified when the virtual machine experiences issues or performance degradation. Azure Monitor provides a set of recommended alert rules based on common performance scenarios that you can quickly enable for your virtual machines.

In this tutorial, you learn how to:

Prerequisites

To complete this tutorial, you need:

• An Azure virtual machine with enhanced monitoring enabled. If you haven't enabled monitoring yet, see Enable enhanced monitoring for an Azure virtual machine.
• Permission to create alert rules and action groups for the virtual machine.

Enable recommended alert rules

From the menu for the VM in the Azure portal, select Alerts in the Monitoring section. Select View + set up or Set up recommended alerts.

A list of recommended alert rules is displayed. You can select which rules to create. You can also change the recommended threshold. Ensure that Email is enabled and provide an email address to be notified when any of the alerts fire. An action group will be created with this address. If you already have an action group that you want to use, you can specify it instead.

Configure alert severity

Expand each of the alert rules to see its details. By default, the severity for each is Informational. You might want to change to another severity such as Error or Warning depending on how critical each condition is for your environment.

Select Save to create the alert rules.

View created alert rules

When the alert rule creation is complete, you'll see the alerts screen for the VM.

Click Alert rules to view the rules you just created. You can click on any of the rules to view their details and to modify their threshold if you want.

Next steps

Now that you have enabled alerts for your virtual machine, you can collect additional guest logs such as Windows event logs or Syslog to further enhance your monitoring capabilities.