Welcome to Netreo!
If you have completed the initial setup wizard in Netreo but are still seeing NO DATA on the dashboard for some of your resources, this article is for you. We’re going to look at most popular reasons why certain resources are not showing data and how to fix them
Setup Wizard
- Ensure that you’ve completed the Setup Wizard. It is by far the simplest way to get started. Netreo will detect and setup everything it can monitor (except Azure Event Hubs and non-Azure resources).
- Ensure to pick monitoring defaults for every resource you care about. It is usually better to unselect resources that you do need to monitor rather than to provide NO monitoring defaults.
- When asked to specify Diagnostic Storage accounts for some Azure Cloud Services or Virtual Machines:
- Ensure to pick storage accounts located in the same data center as the VM. Some organizations often create special dedicated storage accounts specifically to collect diagnostic data
- Keep in mind, that even if your Diagnostics is not enabled or if you do not recall what storage account was used to enable Diagnostics, it is usually NOT a problem. Netreo will simply “take over” the diagnostic configuration and ensure that data is flowing to the storage specified via the wizard. However, it is best if Diagnositcs is enabled for “v2” Azure Resource Manager based VMs prior to wizard running, as it will speed things up
- When asked for credentials to SQL Azure, ensure that provided credentials have VIEW DATABASE STATE permissions. Learn more here.
- When asked for credentials to Azure Service Bus, ensure that provided credentials have Manage claim and are at the Namespace level. Learn more here.
Troubleshooting empty Dashboard or with empty resources
After wizard completes you will likely land on a dashboard full of empty resources. This is OK. Depending on the resource, it may take up to 10-30 minutes for data on certain resources to start flowing thru.
When data is expected but not showing, the primary way to understand why is to look at the “Monitoring Log” view of specific data-lacking resource. For every resource, Monitoring Log will show any errors and warnings that have occurred during last the monitoring cycle. It is almost guaranteed that any resource that was configured with NO default template will show up as an empty box on the dashboard.
Common issues (by resource type) that result in lack of data
- Azure Virtual Machines running under Azure Resource Manager (ARM) API – If Azure Diagnostics is not enabled on these machines, things can get slightly more nuanced. During the Wizard stage of the process, Netreo will ask for Diagnostics Storage accounts and upon completion of the Wizard, will instrument your VMs to start collecting diagnostic data. However, this data will not show up on your dashboards, until you bring up Resource Configuration dialog in Netreo for each VM and specify a “Deployment ID” if it is missing and in “red”. This is an unfortunate side-effect of ARM API, whereby it does not expose Deployment IDs under which captures their data until after that data was started gathering.
- Azure Virtual Machines and Cloud Role – these can take upwards of 10-30 minutes to start showing data.
- SQL Azure databases – lack of data is most commonly attributed to three potential issues. All can be confirmed by checking Monitoring Log view of the empty resource.
- invalid credentials (either wrong username/password)
- credentials that lack VIEW DATABASE STATE permission
- firewall rules on the database that prevent access from any Azure-based resources. You will want to allow Netreo IPs in your firewall.
- read-only database replicas are generally not monitorable and can be safely removed from the dashboard
- Azure Service Bus Queues – lack of data is most commonly attributed to either invalid credentials, or credentials that lack Manage claim at the Namespace level. Check Monitoring Log view to confirm.
- Azure Service Bus Topics – this resource needs extra configuration steps. Specifically, because there can be many Topics in a monitored namespace, metrics for each topic must be setup individually. Additionally, ensure that credentials provided are valid; steps are similar to Queues
- Event Hubs – it is expected that Event Hubs are added manually to the dashboard. Ensure that permissions are provided with steps similar to ASB Queues
- Azure Storage – initially, most users will only see Response Time metric for Storage accounts visible on their dashboards. It takes a little while (10-30 minutes) for Azure to turn on and calculate Storage Analytics, so that other data will flow. Do not worry if you see gaps in the graphs for Storage after analytical data begins to flow. This is normal and is caused by Storage Analytics data often being behind in calculations.
- Other Azure resources – it is expected that all other resources added by the Setup Wizard should start showing data within a few minutes. Lack of data indicates a misconfiguration and can be inspected on the Monitoring Log view.