optimization

Understanding resource utilization is very crucial in determining how your resources are performing. Using this data, you can them make decisions on cost optimization. From my experience, clients are very keen on having a scheduled Resource Utilization Report.

If you are working in an infrastructure team, then your report for a virtual machine may include, CPU utilization, memory, disk usage, network in/Out etc.,

You can use Azure PowerShell to download Azure Insight Metric Data.

As an example, below code shows you how to retrieve CPU Utilization data for an Azure virtual machine.

# Get the virtual machine object
$vm = get-azurermvm -ResourceGroupName "automationResourceGroup" -Name "hybridworker"

# Get the resource ID for the virtual machine
$resourceID = $vm.Id

# Retrieve Azure Insight metric definitions for virtual machines
Get-AzureRmMetricDefinition –ResourceId $resourceID -DetailedOutput

Output of the above cmdlet will fetch a lot of metrics. I have selected the “Percentage CPU”.

sourceId : /subscriptions/aaaaaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd-eeeeeeeee/resourceGroups/automation/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/hybridworker

Name :

LocalizedValue : Percentage CPU

Value : Percentage CPU

Unit : Percent

PrimaryAggregationType : Average

Id : /subscriptions/aaaaaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd-eeeeeeeee/resourceGroups/automation/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/hybridworker/providers/microsoft.insights/metricdefinitions/Percentage CPU

The “Value” will give you the correct Metric Name.

Below code will pull the CPU utilization of the virtual machine for the last 40 minutes.

$endTime = Get-Date
$startTime = $endTime.AddMinutes(-40)
$timeGrain = '00:01:00'
$metricName = 'Percentage CPU'
$metricData = Get-AzureRmMetric -ResourceId $resourceID -TimeGrain $timeGrain -StartTime $startTime -EndTime $endTime -MetricNames $metricName
$metricData.Data

I have shown you how to fetch one such metric for an Azure resource (Azure virtual machine in this case). Similarly, you can fetch metrics for any Azure resource by obtaining the relevant “resourceID” and fetching the appropriate Azure Metric Definition.