Working With Azure Automanage

Introduction

Azure Automanage is the latest feature of managing our virtual machines with optimized, automated operations across the entire VM lifecycle. Automanage is helping us reduce day-to-day management tasks in various areas. Azure Automanage services such as backup, monitoring, update management, security, OS baselines, and more. In this article, we will learn how to deploy Azure Automanage and how to manage our Virtual Machines using Automanage.

The Major benefits and features of using Automanage,

• Machines Insights Monitoring
• Backup (Not supported for Azure Arc machines)
• Azure Security Center
• Microsoft Antimalware (Not supported for Linux and Azure Arc machines)
• Update Management
• Change Tracking and Inventory
• Guest Configuration (Baseline is Audit only for Linux)
• Azure Automation Account
• Log Analytics Workspace
• Boot Diagnostics (Not supported for Azure Arc machines)

The Supported Operating Systems for Automanage,

• Windows Server 2012/R2.
• Windows Server 2016.
• Windows Server 2019.
• CentOS 7.3+, 8.
• RHEL 7.4+, 8.
• Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04.
• SLES 12 (SP3-SP5 only)

Step 1

Type Automanage in the search bar in the Azure portal and then select Automanage – Azure machine best practices.

Step 2

On the Automanage page, Click Enable on an existing machine.

Step 3

On the Enable Automanage page, we must select the Virtual machines, so click Select machine.

Step 4

On the Select machine, select the Subscription that is our Virtual machines are placed, and then select the Virtual machine and click Select.

Step 5

In the Configuration part, we have to select the environment type per our requirement; the table below describes the difference between Dev/Test and Production. In this demo, we will select Production.

Features	Dev/Test	Production
Machines Insights Monitoring	û	ü
Backup (Not supported for Azure Arc machines)	û	ü
Azure Security Center	û	ü
Microsoft Antimalware (Not supported for Linux and Azure Arc machines)	ü	ü
Update Management	ü	ü
Change Tracking and Inventory	ü	ü
Guest Configuration (Baseline is Audit only for Linux)	ü	ü
Azure Automation Account	ü	ü
Log Analytics Workspace	ü	ü
Boot Diagnostics (Not supported for Azure Arc machines)	ü	ü

Step 6

Click Enable to start the process.

Step 7

To verify that the Automanage has been enabled, select the Virtual machine and select Backup; we can find the Automanage has been enabled.

Summary

In this demo, we have learned how to enable Azure Automanage; if you have any questions, please comment under the comment box.