Azure Automanage allows you to deploy basic settings and policies to your virtual machines, such as backup, updates and diagnostics to simplify and automate the onboarding of virtual machines both in Azure and hybrid environments that are enabled by Azure Arc.
Azure offers a set of best practise configuration profiles for both production and dev environments to get you going quick in Azure Automanage or you can create your own custom profile that suits you.
Also, as well as helping us configure important and common settings for our virtual machines, Automanage will detect drift in our virtual machine settings and remediate the issue automatically.
How much does Azure Automanage cost?
Azure Automanage is free. There is no cost to use the Automanage service as you already pay for the underlying resources that are being managed.
What virtual machine types does Azure Automanage support?
Yes, Automanage supports the management of both Windows servers and Linux servers. However, remediation of change drift is not supported for Linux servers.
What Regions does Azure Automanage support?
Asia Pacific
- Southeact Asia
Australia
- Australia East
- Australia Southeast
Canada
- Central Canada
Europe
- North Europe
- West Europe
Japan
- Japan East
United Kingdom
- UK South
United States
- Central US
- East US
- East US 2
- South Central US
- West Central US
- West US
- West US 2
How to enable Azure Automanage for your virtual machines
- Start by logging into the Azure Management Portal https://portal.azure.com/
- Search for Automanage and open the service page
- Under Machine best practices, select Configuration Profiles then click Create
- From the Create a custom profile window, choose your desired configuration options and click Create. You will then see your new profile listed.
- To assign your profile to virtual machines, select the Automanage machines menu option and click Enable on existing machine
- On the basics page, select custom profile and choose your newly created profile, below I have called mine Backup-Profile, then click Next.
- On the machines page, select your virtual machines and click Check eligibility on machines. This will take a moment, the you will see the Eligibility status go green on the right hand side.
When I first went to enable Azure Auto Manage, I got the following error:
Validation failed due to error, please try again and file a support case:{}
This was resolve after I ran the eligibility check on the machines as mentioned above. So if you encounter this error, allow a little time, then try again.
- Now select Review + Create, then Create
- Back to the Automanage machines page, we can see my two virtual machines, one that I just onboarded and one I onboarding before this post. We can see azvmdata2 is showing and conformant and as azvmdata1 has just been added, it is being evaluated.
- For a brief moment azvmdata1 had the status of Not conformant. When selecting the status and clicking on the troubleshooting options button, I saw the following status message:
This looked to have been a red herring as a few minutes later after refreshing the Automanage machines page, it was now showing as conformant.
