Intelligently onboard services.

Azure Automanage is a new feature, in preview, that provide you a full automated solution to:

  • Backup your workloads
  • Update your VMs
  • Logs changes
  • Etc.

The full documentation is available here: Azure Automanage for virtual machines | Microsoft Docs

Before starting, make sure that the VM that you would like to manage are in a supported region. Otherwise, you will have an error message:

An error message

Now, search for Automanage in the portal. Select VMs that you want to add. In this demo, I’ll do the work, with a Windows Server 2019 and a Ubuntu VM:

Search for Automanage in the portal

Now, you can tell if it’s a Dev environment or a Prod environment. Depending of your choice, you will have some settings that will change, like backup retention:

Dev environment or a Prod environment

In the advanced part, you can use an existing automanage account or create a new one. If you create a new one, be sure to be Owner of the RG because you need to give some rights to service accounts:

Use an existing automanage account or create a new one

VM are currently onboarding:

VM are currently onboarding

After few minutes, VMs are onboarded:

VMs are onboarded

If you check your subscription, you will see a new resource group, with some resources, with the subscription id in the name. You will have a new Log Analytics workspace with some solutions, an Azure Automation account and a backup vault:

New resource group

You can see that VMs have been onboarded in the backup vault:

Backup items

With an automanage policy:

Modify policy

If you go on the Automation account, in the Update Management part, you will see your 2 VMs, with the compliance status. For example here, 2 security updates are missing on my Windows VM:

See your 2 VMs, with the compliance status

Now, on your Log Analytics workspace, you can see solutions that have been deployed:

Log Analytics workspace

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I can see my 2 VMs on the Updates solution. I have same information as in the Update Management in Azure Automation;

Updates solution

And changes on my Windows VM:

Change tracking

Logs

As you can see, it is very easy to onboard a VM, on this tool, to keep it in your standard, like all other VMs.

We will now wait for the price of this tool when it will be in GA 😊

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Florent Appointaire
Florent Appointaire
Florent Appointaire is Microsoft Engineer with 5 years of experience, specialized in Cloud Technologies (Public/Hybrid/Private). He is a freelance consultant in Belgium from the beginning of 2017. He is MVP Cloud and Datacentre Management. He is MCSE Private Cloud and Hyper-V certified. His favorite products are SCVMM, SCOM, Windows Azure pack/Azure Stack and Microsoft Azure.

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