Azure Network Watcher

In this Azure article, we will discuss Azure network watcher.

Azure Network Watcher

Azure Network Watcher is an excellent tool that helps you with different tools for monitoring and diagnosing different issues related to your network and provides you with the logs for the resources that belong to your virtual network.

It also helps you to view metrics and mainly provides you the opportunity to monitor your Azure Virtual Networks, Your Virtual Machines (VM), Load Balancers, your application Gateways, etc., and helps you to repair in case of any issues with respect to the networks.

Azure Network Watcher is mainly for monitoring and repairing different issues related to the network health of your IaaS products and is not supposed to work for your PaaS products.

Suppose you want to monitor the communication between different endpoints or between different virtual machines or between the virtual machine and the endpoints with respect to the network changes, latency, etc.. In that case, the Network Watcher can also help you with this purpose.

Most Important Features of Azure Network Watcher

Below is the list of key features of Azure Network Watcher.

Better Monitoring Capability

Azure Network Watcher helps you monitor different endpoints, VMs, IPv4 addresses, FQDN, etc. You can easily get a clear picture of the communication, network issues, latency, etc.

Tools for diagnosing

It provides you with different diagnostic tools for diagnosing issues related to your virtual network, network traffic, routing problems with the network for your VM, outbound connections from your Virtual Machine, the issues with your Azure Virtual Network Gateway, any issues capturing packets from your Virtual Machine or to your Virtual Machine.

View Metrics

You can view the metrics or the summary of the number of network resources you have created or deployed within your Azure subscription, the name of the resource, the current limit, and the usage within your subscription or even region.

Viewing The Logs

Azure Network Watcher allows you to view and analyze the logs.

With the help of the NSG flow log, you can log the IP address of your source and destination, the protocol and the port details, etc.

You can enable logging for different network resources like load balancers, application gateways, virtual network gateways, etc.

It is easy to view the logs with the help of Power BI and the traffic analytics feature where you will get a very good visualization of your NSG flow logs.

Creating Azure Network Watcher

Follow the below steps to create an Azure Network Watcher

  1. Log in to the Azure Portal.
  2. Search for Azure Network Watcher and then click on the search result Network Watcher.
network watcher azure

3. Click on the + Add button on the Network Watcher page.

what azure resource should you provision before you enable network watcher nsg flow logs?

4. On the Add Network Watcher window, select the subscription you want to use here and select the region for which you want to add the network watcher.

Finally, click on the Add button.

network watcher azure

It will take a few seconds to see a message like the one below that the Deployment succeeded.

azure network watcher

You can able to see the Network Watcher was created successfully. Click on the name to see the details of the Network Watcher.

what azure resource should you provision before you enable network watcher nsg flow logs

Wrapping Up

In this article, we have discussed how to create Azure Network Watcher, An introduction to Azure Network Watcher. I hope you have some idea about Azure Network Watcher usage.