Azure Load Balancer

Azure Load Balancer is an Azure service that allows you to evenly distribute incoming network traffic across a group of Azure VMs or instances in a Virtual Machine Scale Set. This integration helps in monitoring inbound and outbound data throughput, outbound flows, and the application endpoint health of your Load Balancers.

Log and metric types

For Azure Load Balancer, you can collect the following logs and metrics:

Load Balancer Health Event. These health event logs are emitted when any issues affecting your load balancer’s health and availability are detected. Learn more.
Load Balancer Metrics. These metrics are available in Microsoft.Network/loadBalancers namespace.

For more information on supported metrics, refer to Azure documentation.

Setup

note

This app only supports load balancers of Standard and Gateway SKUs.

Azure service sends monitoring data to Azure Monitor, which can then stream data to Eventhub. Sumo Logic supports:

Metrics collection using our Azure Metrics Source.

You must explicitly enable diagnostic settings for each Load Balancer you want to monitor. You can forward logs to the same event hub provided they satisfy the limitations and permissions as described here.

When you configure the event hubs source or HTTP source, plan your source category to ease the querying process. A hierarchical approach allows you to make use of wildcards. For example: Azure/LoadBalancer/Logs and Azure/LoadBalancer/Metrics.

Configure metrics collection

To set up the Azure Metrics source in Sumo Logic, refer to Azure Metrics Source.

Configure logs collection

Diagnostic logs

In this section, you will configure a pipeline for shipping diagnostic logs from Azure Monitor to an Event Hub.

To set up the Azure Event Hubs source in Sumo Logic, refer to the Azure Event Hubs Source for Logs.
To create the diagnostic settings in the Azure portal, refer to the Azure documentation. Perform the steps below for each Azure load balancer account that you want to monitor.
1. Choose Stream to an event hub as the destination.
2. Select allLogs.
3. Use the Event Hub namespace and Event Hub name configured in the previous step in the destination details section. You can use the default policy RootManageSharedAccessKey as the policy name.
Tag the location field in the source with the right location value.

Activity Logs

To collect activity logs, follow the instructions here. Do not perform this step if you are already collecting activity logs for a subscription.

note

Since this source contains logs from multiple regions, ensure that you do not tag this source with the location tag.

Installing the Azure Load Balancer app

Now that you have set up data collection, install the Azure Load Balancer Sumo Logic app to use the pre-configured dashboards that provide visibility into your environment for real-time analysis of overall usage.

To install the app:

Select App Catalog.
In the Search Apps field, search for and then select your app.
Optionally, you can scroll down to preview the dashboards included with the app. Then, click Install App (sometimes this button says Add Integration).
Click Next.
Look for the dialog confirming that your app was installed successfully.

Once an app is installed, it will appear in your Personal folder or the folder that you specified. From here, you can share it with other users in your organization. Dashboard panels will automatically start to fill with data matching the time range query received since you created the panel. Results won't be available immediately, but within about 20 minutes, you'll see completed graphs and maps.

As part of the app installation process, the following fields will be created by default:

tenant_name. This field is tagged at the collector level. You can get the tenant name using the instructions here.
location. The region to which the resource name belongs to.
subscription_id. ID associated with a subscription where the resource is present.
resource_group. The resource group name where the Azure resource is present.
provider_name. Azure resource provider name (for example, Microsoft.Network).
resource_type. Azure resource type (for example, storage accounts).
resource_name. The name of the resource (for example, storage account name).
service_type. Type of the service that can be accessed with a Azure resource.
service_name. Services that can be accessed with an Azure resource (for example, in Azure Container Instances the service is Subscriptions).

Viewing the Azure Load Balancer dashboards

All dashboards have a set of filters that you can apply to the entire dashboard. Use these filters to drill down and examine the data to a granular level.

You can change the time range for a dashboard or panel by selecting a predefined interval from a drop-down list, choosing a recently used time range, or specifying custom dates and times. Learn more.
You can use template variables to drill down and examine the data on a granular level. For more information, see Filtering Dashboards with Template Variables.
Most Next-Gen apps allow you to provide the scope at the installation time and are comprised of a key (_sourceCategory by default) and a default value for this key. Based on your input, the app dashboards will be parameterized with a dashboard variable, allowing you to change the dataset queried by all panels. This eliminates the need to create multiple copies of the same dashboard with different queries.

Overview

The Azure Load Balancer - Overview dashboard provides collective information on Health Probe Status, Average Data Path Availability, Transmission Details, Connection Details, and SNAT Ports Utilization(%).

Administrative Operations

The Azure Load Balancer - Administrative Operations dashboard provides details like distribution by operation type, by operation, recent delete operations, top 10 operations that caused most errors, and users/applications by operation type.

Use this dashboard to:

Identify top users performing administrative operations.
View the top 10 operations that caused the most errors.
View recent read, write, and delete operations.

Azure Load Balancer Administrative Operations

Health

The Azure Load Balancer - Health dashboard provides details like total failed requests, failures by operation, health probe status trends, and unhealthy backends.

Use this dashboard to:

Identify failed requests and operations.
Detect when all backend instances in a pool are not responding to the configured health probes.

Network

The Azure Load Balancer - Network dashboard provides details like Packets Transmitted by the Load Balancer, TCP SYN packets by the Load Balancer, Bytes Transmitted by the Load Balancer, Average Data Path Availability Trend, SNAT Connection Count, SNAT Ports Utilization, Allocated SnatPorts, and Used SnatPorts.

Use this dashboard to:

Detect high utilization of allocated ports.
Detect when there is less data path availability than expected due to platform issues.
Monitor data transmission (packets and bytes) through your load balancers.

Policy

The Azure Load Balancer - Policy dashboard provides details like total success policy events, success policy events, total failed policy events, and failed policy events.

Use this dashboard to:

Monitor policy events with warnings and errors.
View recent failed policy events.