Azure Connection Monitor

We often need a continuous network monitoring solution from Azure infrastructure towards external or internal destinations. Whether our application misbehave or there could be an endpoint throttling or you are observing some high amount of failure or latency, Azure Network Watcher have a dedicated solution for achieving these tests.

Azure Connection Monitor provides capabilities to continuously monitor connectivity between a source and a destination environment with a customizable test configuration. Azure Connection Monitor can use as source a Virtual Machine or Virtual Machine Scale Set. For this feature to work we need to install Network Watcher extension on VM or VMSS. This can be done in Azure Portal, on respective resource, Extension tab.

We will create the connection monitor in Network Watcher resource as in the following screenshot.

We will define a name for this and create in the same region where our Source resources are created, in our case is West Europe.

On Add test group details page, we will find the following components that needs to be configured:

- Source : VM/VMSS Instance used for sourcing test traffic

- Configuration: Test configurations, Ports (POST/GET)

- Destination: Endpoints where our traffic will be sent as per our configuration. It can be internal to Azure or and external address, eg. https://microsoft.com

Currently, it is not possible to enable this extension on the VMSS of the AKS Cluster, in order to have this test run successfully you can build a temporary VM in the same Subnet as the AKS Cluster and use it as a source VM with extension provisioned.

Based on the endpoint configuration, we need to choose our desired protocol, ports, HTTP configuration, Path, Threshold and RTT

The last step in this process is to add the endpoint. In our case, we will use an External Address.

We select the Create button to deploy our Connection Monitor configuration. After this deployment, in the same Tab we can found a Dashboard with the results of preceding tests and the graphics for the test results.