Identify low usage Azure IaaS VM's

Question

I have been working on the Azure monitoring side for a while. I need your inputs for one of my requirement.

We have lot of IaaS VM’s both SQL and Non-SQL provisioned in our subscriptions. We are paying non-trivial amount for these VM’s. I am trying to come up w/ solution to identify low usage machines and during what times( night, early morning etc) the usage is very low. With this, I can take an action by either shut down VM’s during low usage period or reduce VM size.

For this, I am trying couple of options like Azure Advisor, Azure metrics for CPU usage, Network I/O, Disk Read/Write parameters. But considering only these might not help. Because, your network I/O might be having load balancer requests which cannot be considered.

So I need to come up w/ actual IIS requests went in during the given period. Can you recommend on how to identify low usage VM’s? It would be a great help.

Answer 1

Can you recommend on how to identify low usage VM’s?

Generally, we will based on CPU usage to identify low usage VM.

Network traffic in or out of one application might be having load balancer requests, but network traffic in or out of this VM will not have load balancer, we also can use this to identify low usage VM.

So I need to come up w/ actual IIS requests went in during the given period.

We can use OMS to monitor IIS request of each VMs in Azure, please follow this article to configure OMS.

like this:

Also we can config zabbix on one Azure VM and use that to monitor all VMs.