Alert for Azure Virtual Machine running for X hours? - azure

Question

I use an Azure VM for personal purposes and use it mostly like I would use a laptop for checking email etc. However, I have several times forgot to stop the VM when I am done using it and thus have had it run idle for days, if not weeks, resulting in unnecessarily high billing.
I want to set up an email (and if possible also SMS and push notification) alert.
I have looked at the alert function in the advisor, but it does not seem to have enough customization to handle such a specific alert (which would also reduce Microsoft's income!).
Do you know any relatively simple way to set up such an alert?

Answer 1

You can take use of Log Analytics workspaces and Custom log search.
The below are the steps to create an alert, which will send the alert if the azure vm is running exactly 1 hour.
First:
you need to create a Log Analytics workspaces and connect to azure vm as per this link.
Sencod:
1.In azure portal, nav to Azure Monitor -> Alerts -> New alert rule.
2.In the "Create rule" page, for Resource, select the Log Analytics workspaces you created ealier. Screenshot as below:
Then for Condition, please select Custom log search. Screenshot as below:
Then in the Configure signal logic page, in Search query, input the following query:
Heartbeat
| where Computer == "yangtestvm" //this is your azure vm name
| order by TimeGenerated desc
For Alert logic: set Based on as Number of results, set Operator as Equal to, set Threshold value as 60.
For Evaluated based on: set Period as 60, set Frequency as 5.
The screenshot as below:
Note:
for the above settings, I query the Heartbeat table. For azure vm which is running, it always sends data to log analytics to the Heartbeat table per minute. So if I want to check if the azure vm is running exactly 1 hour(means it sends 60 data to Heartbeat table), just use the above query, and set the Threshold value to 60.
Another thing is the Period, it also needs to be set as 1 hour(60 minutes) since I just check if the azure vm is running for 1 hour; for Frequecy, you can set it any value you like.
If you understand what I explains, you can change these values as per your need.
At last, set the other settings for this alert.
Please let me know if you still have more issues about this.

Answer 2

Another option is to use the Azure Activity log to determine if a VM has been running for more than a specified amount of time. The benefit to this approach is that you don't need to enable Diagnostic Logging (Log Analytics), it also supports appliances that can't have an agent installed (i.e. NVAs).
The logic behind this query is to determine if the VM is in a running state, and if so has it been running for more than a specified period of time (MaxUpTime).
This is achieved by getting the most recent event of type 'Start' or 'Deallocate', then checking if this event is of type 'Start' and was generated more than 'MaxUpTime' ago
let DaysOfLogsToCheck = ago(7days);
let MaxUptime = ago(2h); // If the VM has been up for this long we want to know about it
AzureActivity
| where TimeGenerated > DaysOfLogsToCheck
// ActivityStatus == "Succeeded" makes more sense, but in practice it can be out of order, so "Started" is better in the real world
| where OperationName in ("Deallocate Virtual Machine", "Start Virtual Machine") and ActivityStatus == "Started"
// We need to keep only the most recent entry of type 'Deallocate Virtual Machine' or 'Start Virtual Machine'
| top 1 by TimeGenerated desc
// Check if the most recent entry was "Start Virtual Machine" and is older than MaxUpTime
| where OperationName == "Start Virtual Machine" and TimeGenerated <= MaxUptime
| project TimeGenerated, Resource, OperationName, ActivityStatus, ResourceId