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Setup Alerts for Virtual Machine Events
More Info:
Ensure that an Azure activity log alert is fired whenever ‘Create Virtual Machine’ or ‘Update Virtual Machine’ events are triggered in your Microsoft Azure cloud account. Activity log alerts get triggered when a new activity log event that matches the condition specified in the alert configuration occurs. The matched condition is Whenever the Administrative Activity Log ‘Create or Update Virtual Machine (Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines)’ has ‘any’ level, with ‘any’ status and event is initiated by ‘any’
Risk Level
Informational
Address
Security
Compliance Standards
CBP
Triage and Remediation
Remediation
Sure, here are the step by step instructions to remediate the misconfiguration “Setup Alerts for Virtual Machine Events” in Azure using the Azure console:
- Log in to the Azure portal (https://portal.azure.com/).
- Navigate to the “Virtual machines” section.
- Select the virtual machine for which you want to set up alerts.
- In the left-hand menu, click on “Alerts”.
- Click on the “New alert rule” button.
- In the “Basics” tab, give a name for the alert rule.
- In the “Condition” tab, select “Virtual machine” under “Resource type”.
- Under “Condition”, select the event type you want to set up an alert for. For example, you can select “VM deallocated” to get an alert when the virtual machine is deallocated.
- Under “Additional condition”, you can set up additional conditions for the alert rule if required.
- In the “Actions” tab, select “Email/SMS/Push/Voice” under “Action group”. If you haven’t set up an action group yet, you can create a new one by clicking on “New action group”.
- In the “Notifications” tab, add the email addresses or phone numbers of the recipients who should receive the alerts.
- Click on the “Create alert rule” button to create the alert rule.
By following these steps, you should be able to successfully remediate the misconfiguration “Setup Alerts for Virtual Machine Events” in Azure using the Azure console.
To remediate the misconfiguration “Setup Alerts for Virtual Machine Events” in Azure using Azure CLI, you can follow the below steps:
-
Open Azure CLI and login to your Azure account using the command
az login -
Set the default subscription that you want to work with using the command
az account set --subscription <subscription_id> -
Create a new action group to define the actions to be taken when an alert is triggered using the command
az monitor action-group create --name <action_group_name> --short-name <short_name> --email <email_address> --sms <phone_number>Note: Replace
<action_group_name>,<short_name>,<email_address>and<phone_number>with your desired values. -
Create a new alert rule that will trigger an alert when a virtual machine event occurs using the command
az monitor metrics alert create --name <alert_rule_name> --description <description> --resource-group <resource_group_name> --scopes <vm_resource_id> --condition "category=ServiceHealth and resourceName=<vm_name>" --action <action_group_name>Note: Replace
<alert_rule_name>,<description>,<resource_group_name>,<vm_resource_id>,<vm_name>and<action_group_name>with your desired values. -
Verify the alert rule by running the command
az monitor metrics alert show --name <alert_rule_name> --resource-group <resource_group_name>Note: Replace
<alert_rule_name>and<resource_group_name>with your desired values.
By following these steps, you will be able to remediate the misconfiguration “Setup Alerts for Virtual Machine Events” in Azure using Azure CLI.
To remediate the misconfiguration “Setup Alerts for Virtual Machine Events” in Azure using Python, you can follow the below steps:
Step 1: Install the Azure SDK for Python using pip command.
pip install azure-mgmt-compute
Step 2: Create an Azure AD application and service principal. This can be done using the Azure portal or Azure CLI.
Step 3: Authenticate the application and service principal using the below code snippet.
from azure.common.credentials import ServicePrincipalCredentials
TENANT_ID = '<tenant_id>'
CLIENT_ID = '<client_id>'
CLIENT_SECRET = '<client_secret>'
credentials = ServicePrincipalCredentials(
client_id=CLIENT_ID,
secret=CLIENT_SECRET,
tenant=TENANT_ID
)
Step 4: Use the Azure SDK for Python to create an alert rule for virtual machine events. The below code snippet creates an alert rule for virtual machine start and stop events.
from azure.mgmt.monitor import MonitorManagementClient
from azure.mgmt.monitor.models import *
SUBSCRIPTION_ID = '<subscription_id>'
RESOURCE_GROUP_NAME = '<resource_group_name>'
VM_NAME = '<vm_name>'
monitor_client = MonitorManagementClient(credentials, SUBSCRIPTION_ID)
condition = AlertRuleAllOfCondition(
all_of=[
AlertRuleLeafCondition(
field='category',
equals='Administrative'
),
AlertRuleLeafCondition(
field='resourceId',
contains=VM_NAME
),
AlertRuleLeafCondition(
field='operationName',
equals='Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/start/action'
),
AlertRuleLeafCondition(
field='operationName',
equals='Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/deallocate/action'
)
]
)
actions = AlertRuleActionList(
action_groups=[
'/subscriptions/{}/resourceGroups/{}/providers/microsoft.insights/actionGroups/<action_group_name>'.format(SUBSCRIPTION_ID, RESOURCE_GROUP_NAME)
]
)
alert_rule = AlertRule(
location='global',
condition=condition,
actions=actions,
description='Alert for virtual machine start and stop events'
)
monitor_client.alert_rules.create_or_update(
RESOURCE_GROUP_NAME,
'vm-start-stop-alert',
alert_rule
)
Step 5: The above code snippet will create an alert rule for virtual machine start and stop events. You can modify the code to create alert rules for other events as well.
Note: Replace the placeholders <tenant_id>, <client_id>, <client_secret>, <subscription_id>, <resource_group_name>, <vm_name> and <action_group_name> with actual values.