Configuring Log and Performance Counter collection on the OMS Workspace

Following the introduction to the Azure Advanced Analytics article where we have provisioned an OMS Workspace and took a quick look on it's settings, we are now going to add the windows logs we would like to collect along with some system performance counters.

To get to the Data settings of the workspace, we are going to use the Advanced Settings option on the main workspace blade. Here, you have to type the name of the log and then click the plus sign in order to add it. As shown below, I've started with the application and system logs that contain very useful information about the system and the applications that may be running on it.


When done adding logs, click the save button to save the configuration.

Now that we have configured the logs to collect, we are going to move on to the performance counters by clicking on "Windows Performance Counters".

The Advanced Analytics team suggests a few counters related to disk, memory, processor and network, so go ahead and add all of them.


To add a counter that's not listed on the above ones, you have to follow a format. The name of the counter should be the name of the listset followed by the instance in parentheses and then and backslash and the name of the counter.

Let's take for example the "% Managed Processor Time (estimated)" counter of the "ASP.NET Applications" set of an Exchange server.


The string to use in order to add all instances of the counter to the workspace would be "ASP.NET Applications(*)\% Managed Processor Time (estimated)". In case we just wanted to add the total processor time and not the individual counters we'd use "ASP.NET Applications(_Total)\% Managed Processor Time (estimated)".


Don't forget to save the configuration by clicking the save button when done adding counters.

We are now ready to configure our first agent!

Related articles
    Introduction to Azure Advanced Analytics
    Configuring Log and Performance Counter collection on the OMS Workspace
    Install and Configure the OMS Windows Agent
    Verify the Agent Connectivity to OMS Workspace
    Deploying the OMS Windows Agent using DSC
    Querying OMS for Performance Data
    Querying OMS for Events
    Collecting IIS Log Files
    Install and Configure the OMS Linux Agent
    Syslog Message Collection for OMS from sources that do not support the agent
    Generating Alerts on OMS
    Update Management using OMS
    Monitoring Active Directory Health using OMS
    Assessing Security using OMS
    Monitoring Microsoft SQL using OMS
    Monitoring Azure Activity Log using OMS

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