Azure load balancers with no healthy instances
Azure Load Balancers provide high availability by distributing incoming traffic among healthy virtual machines (VMs). An Azure Load Balancer health probe monitors a given port on each VM and only distributes traffic to operational VMs. As an administrator, you need to run a search to ensure that there are enough healthy VMs supporting the traffic requests.
Data required
Microsoft: Azure data
Procedure
- Configure the Microsoft Azure Add-on for Splunk.
- Run the following search. You can optimize it by specifying an index and adjusting the time range.
sourcetype=azure:metrics metric_name=VipAvailability
| mvexpand host
| search host="/subscription*"
| rex field=host "(?<resource>[^\/]*)\Z"
| dedup host sortby - _time
| eval {metric_name}=average
| where VipAvailability=0
| table resource VipAvailability namespace subscription_id
| rename resource AS LB VipAvailability AS Availability namespace AS Namespace subscription_id AS Subscription
Search explanation
The table provides an explanation of what each part of this search achieves. You can adjust this query based on the specifics of your environment.
| Splunk Search | Explanation |
|---|---|
sourcetype=azure:metrics metric_name=VipAvailability |
Search only Azure metric VipAvailability data. |
| mvexpand host |
Expand values of the host field into separate events. |
| search host="/subscription*" |
Filter to a subset of hosts. |
| rex field=host "(?<resource>[^\/]*)\Z" |
Extract the resource name from the host field. |
| dedup host sortby - _time |
Return only one record per host or resource. |
| eval {metric_name}=average |
Create a new field where the VipAvailability metric equals the average field value. |
| where VipAvailability=0 |
Identify when the VipAvailability metric is 0. |
| table resource VipAvailability namespace subscription_id |
Display the host, VipAvailability, namespace and subscription_id fields. |
| rename resource AS LB VipAvailability AS Availability namespace AS Namespace subscription_id AS Subscription |
Improve field name readability. |
Next steps
If there are no healthy VMs supporting the traffic requests, there's likely a problem to investigate.
You might also be interested in other processes associated with the Managing Azure cloud infrastructure use case.

