Managing and monitoring your VM

Managing and monitoring your VM

From within the myDRE web portal, you can find a Manage and monitor VM menu that provides links directly to your VM in the Azure portal and Azure app.
Within the Azure portal or app, you can start, stop and reset the VM, as well as analyze its metrics. Please read more about these possibilities below. 
To access the Manage and monitor menu, select a VM and click on the phone button (see 1 in picture below).
  1. If you're using a computer, you can click on the link (2 in pic), which will take you to the VM in the Azure portal. 
  2. If you're using a smartphone, you can either click on the link, or scan the QR code with your camera*, which will open the VM in the Azure app or in the Azure portal. We recommend to install the Azure app beforehand; this is much easier to use than the web portal.
* This may require an additional QR-scan app. 



  1. Select your virtual machine, click on three dots and select option Manage and Monitor
  2. Click on the link below the QR code and this will take you to the Azure portal. 

How to stop, start and restart your VM from the Azure portal or app

In the Azure portal or App, you can stop, start and restart your VM.
Especially when your VM is not working as it should (e.g. it's stuck in 'allocating' status, or it won't let you log in), restarting the VM from here can help you out.
Below, we assume you've already opened the VM in the Azure portal/app through the instructions in the previous section.

In the Azure portal

  1. Go to the Overview section.
  2. Click on either the Start, Stop and Restart buttons. Of course, the available buttons depend on the current status of the VM.
  3. Wait for the VM to change status.
 

In the Azure app

  1. Click on Start/Stop/Restart on the bottom. Of course, the available buttons depend on the current status of the VM.
  2. Wait for the VM to change status.
Tip: if you want to be able to access you VM quickly and directly from the Azure app, consider starring it.
This will create a shortcut in the app or portal directly to your VM. 
Super handy if you're traveling to work and you want to launch your VM in advance, so you can start working on it directly when you arrive.

How to monitor a VM

You might be interested in the statistics of your VM. For instance to see if your VM can still handle your workload, or perhaps if there's a lot of computational resources unused. Also if you're running into issues with the performance of your VM, you should take a look at these metrics, to see if the bottleneck is the VM itself, or perhaps something else (see warning below). 
Below, we assume you've already opened the VM through the instructions in the first section.

In the Azure portal

  1. Go to Monitoring > Metrics.
  2. In the overview, select the metric (e.g. CPU percentage) and aggregation unit. Also set your time window in the upper right corner (24h by default).
  3. This will produce a graph. Inspect the graph to learn more about the performance of your VM, and possibly identify bottlenecks in performance. 

In the Azure app

  1. The overview directly gives you a graph of the CPU usage.
  2. Click on "More" in the top right of the graph for additional graphs.
  3. Inspect the graphs to learn more about the performance of your VM, and possibly identify bottlenecks in performance. 
If you find that your VM is using all its resources, you would benefit from resizing it to a larger VM type. The same holds true for the opposite; if there's low usagem a smaller VM is more suitable. 

The VM size is not the only potential bottleneck for performance. It could also be that your disks are not fast enough.
If this is the case for you, first try to temporarily move your files to the C:-drive, which is by default faster. You can also expand this C:-drive.
If you need a faster Z:-drive, you can put in a request for a change by creating a ticket on the current website.

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