The company is making sure that Linux users can monitor and diagnose their operating systems on Azure

Jun 11, 2015 08:32 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft is finally noticing that most for the workloads on Virtual Machines on Azure are actually Linux-powered, and they are finally releasing the necessary tools to monitor those workloads.

When Microsoft launched this cloud computing platform called Azure, there wasn't much hope that it will be able to host Linux machines. This was way back in 2010, in the Steve Balmer era, a Microsoft CEO that didn't like the open source platform at all. The management has changed in the meantime and Azure along with it. In fact, most of the OSes that run now on Azure are actually Linux based. Some of them are Ubuntu, CentOS, and a few others.

As you can expect, there are already some tools in place to monitor the Windows VMs, but now the users of Azure, who have deployed Linux workloads will be able to do the same, although it's worth mentioning that this feature is currently in preview, and it's not the final version. This is Microsoft's way of telling us that there are probably still a lot of bugs present.

Azure now provides more control for Linux users

Microsoft Azure has a lot of users, and the service has been growing steadily in the past few years. The fact that it's also used by Linux users and Microsoft making the life of these users much easier are signs that things are changing in Redmond.

"A significant number of Virtual Machines on Azure today are running Linux workloads. In my post from September, I shared details on how to setup, configure and read metrics to monitor and diagnose Windows VMs running on Azure.Recently we published a monitoring agent that is enabled for Linux VMs running on Azure when the user enables monitoring and diagnostics and takes advantage of the same Azure extension technology that is supported on Azure VMs. To enable monitoring and diagnostics for Azure Linux VMs, you enable and install monitoring agent through the portal UI by turning on Diagnostics, Azure CLI, PowerShell or through the Azure SDKs," wrote Khalid Mouss, a program manager at Microsoft.

The blog post goes into many more details about the monitoring tools available on Microsoft Azure for Linux workloads, so if you're interested, you should really check it out.