Updates to Azure Monitor for virtual machines (preview) before general availability release

The Azure Monitor for VMs team is busy preparing for our GA release and we wanted to share some details on upcoming changes that will occur ahead of our GA announcement.

Updates for Azure Monitor for virtual machines (VMs)
We will be releasing a new version of Azure Monitor for VMs in mid November. New customers will automatically receive the new version, but existing customers already using Azure Monitor for VMs will be prompted to upgrade. Our documentation will offer guidance on doing a bulk upgrade for customers with large deployments across multiple workspaces.

With this upgrade, Azure Monitor for VMs performance datasets will be stored in the same InsightsMetrics table as Azure Monitor for containers and will make it easier for you to query the two data sets. Also, we will be able to store more diverse data sets that we could not store in the previous table we used. Our performance views will also be updated to use this new table.

In addition, data that has been stored in the custom log tables ServiceMapComputer_CL and ServiceMapProcess_CL will move to dedicated data types in Log Analytics. These new tables will be named VMComputer and VMProcess. This update will allow us to better prioritize how quickly we can ingest the data and will standardize the table schema across all customers.

We realize that asking existing customers to upgrade causes disruption to their workflow, which is why we have chosen to do this now while in Public Preview rather than later once we arrive in GA.

Health feature to enter limited public preview
We have received a lot of great feedback from customers about our VM health feature set. There is a lot of interest around this feature and excitement over its potential for supporting monitoring workflows. We are planning to make a series of changes to add functionality and address the feedback we have received. To minimize impact of these changes on new customers, we are moving this feature into a limited public preview.

Existing customers will continue to have access to the health feature as part of the limited public preview by adding a feature flag in the URL, but we will not be enabling the health feature for new customers.

This transition will begin in mid October and should be completed by the end of the month.

Summary
With the above updates for Azure Monitor for VMs we will be laying the foundation for moving the offering into GA. Our goal is to make a GA announcement before year end.

For additional information to plan for these changes please refer to our onboarding documentation and GA Release FAQ.
If you have additional questions you would like to send the team you can contact us.