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Splunk Lantern

Inventory of Azure virtual machines

 

As an administrator, you want to have a high-level view of the number and type of virtual machines running in your Azure infrastructure. 

Data required 

Microsoft: Azure virtual machine data

Procedure

  1. Configure the Splunk Add-on for Microsoft Cloud Services.
  2. Run the following search. You can optimize it by specifying an index and adjusting the time range.
sourcetype="mscs:resource:virtualMachine"
|fillnull tags{} value="No Tags!"
|fillnull properties.instanceView.extensions{}.name value="" 
|stats latest(power_state) BY vm_name, location, properties.storageProfile.imageReference.offer, properties.storageProfile.imageReference.sku ,vm_size, tags{}, properties.instanceView.extensions{}.name 
|eval mem_capacity=(mem_capacity/1024/1024/1024) 
|fields - count 
|rename vm_name AS "VM Name" latest(power_state) AS Status vm_size AS Size properties.storageProfile.imageReference.offer AS OS properties.storageProfile.imageReference.sku AS Version mem_capacity AS "Memory GB" location_name AS Location cpu_cores AS CPU tags{} AS Tags properties.instanceView.extensions{}.name AS Extensions

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="mscs:resource:virtualMachine"

Search only Azure virtual machine data. 

|fillnull tags{} value="No Tags!"

Fill all null tag values with “No Tags!” 

|fillnull properties.instanceView.extensions{}.name value="" 

Fill all null extension values with an empty string. 

|stats latest(power_state) BY vm_name, location, properties.storageProfile.imageReference.offer, properties.storageProfile.imageReference.sku ,vm_size, tags{}, properties.instanceView.extensions{}.name 

Locate the most recent value for all relevant fields. 

|eval mem_capacity=(mem_capacity/1024/1024/1024) 

Calculate the memory capacity for all virtual machines. 

|fields - count 

Remove the count field from the results. 

|rename vm_name AS "VM Name" latest(power_state) AS Status vm_size AS Size properties.storageProfile.imageReference.offer AS OS properties.storageProfile.imageReference.sku AS Version mem_capacity AS "Memory GB" location_name AS Location cpu_cores AS CPU tags{} AS Tags properties.instanceView.extensions{}.name AS Extensions

Rename the fields as shown for better readability.

Next steps

Sample results for this search are shown in the table below. The status field can be an important item to monitor for cost saving reasons. A status of stopped (not shown below) indicates a VM that had the OS shut down or stopped, but the VM is still allocated and is costing money. Finding those and having the VM deallocated would be useful. 

VM Name location OS Version Size Tags Extensions Status

JaneDoeServer

southcentralus

WindowsServer

2016-Datacenter

Standard_B1s

No Tags!

 

running

RYCRYpt0

australiasoutheast

CentOS

7.5

Standard_B1s

Owner : RYCRYpt0

 

starting

Ry-Win10

australiasoutheast

Windows-10

rs5-pro

Standard_D2

Owner : Ryan

Microsoft.Insights.VMDiagnosticsSettings

running

Ry-Win10

australiasoutheast

Windows-10

rs5-pro

Standard_D2

Owner : Ryan

MicrosoftMonitoringAgent

running

Ry-Win10

australiasoutheast

Windows-10

rs5-pro

Standard_D2

Purpose : P5

Microsoft.Insights.VMDiagnosticsSettings

running

You might also be interested in other processes associated with the Managing Azure cloud infrastructure use case.