Azure Virtual Machine Health Dashboard

Challenge

The Azure Management Services team at Catapult required a quick way to visualize the key health pieces for their customers, using a visually intuitive dashboard.

Dashboard walk-through

• Free space shows the amount of free space for each disk. It is shown by computer, disk, and includes a bar chart for the % free disk space, as well as the free space in GB and when the data was generated. The free space available is ordered from the least to the most amount of disk space available, top to bottom. That way, they can easily see which needs addressing first.

• Computer AVG CPU shows the computer and the average CPU in a bar chart.
• Agent details show the computer and its state, the environment it is in, what Operating System it is running, the Azure Resource (if applicable) and when the last heartbeat occurred for that computer.
• Agent details (trend) shows the history of heartbeats for the computers in the environment.

To create the colored dots in the Agent Details grid tile, we used a query that looked at last heartbeat and identifies whether it’s healthy or unhealthy. If it’s healthy, show the green dot emoji and if unhealthy show the red dot emoji. The colored dot provides a quick visual indicator that’s easier to digest than text.