Azure Local LENS workbook—deep insights at scale, in minutes

Azure Local at scale needs fleet-level visibility

As Azure Local deployments grow from a handful of instances to hundreds (or even thousands), the operational questions change. You’re no longer troubleshooting a single environment—you’re looking for patterns across your entire fleet: Which sites are trending with a specific health issue? Where are workload deployments increasing over time, do we have enough capacity available? Which clusters are outliers compared to the rest?

Today we’re sharing Azure Local LENS: a free, community-driven Azure Workbook designed to help you gain deep insights across a large Azure Local fleet—quickly and consistently—so you can move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive operations.

Get the workbook and step-by-step instructions to deploy it here: https://aka.ms/AzureLocalLENS

Who is it for?

This workbook is especially useful if you manage or support:

• Large Azure Local fleets distributed across many sites (retail, manufacturing, branch offices, healthcare, etc.).
• Central operations teams that need standardized health/update views.
• Architects who want to aggregate data to gain insights in cluster and workload deployment trends over time.

What is Azure Local LENS?

Azure Local - Lifecycle, Events & Notification Status (or LENS) workbook brings together the signals you need to understand your Azure Local estate through a fleet lens. Instead of jumping between individual resources, you can use a consistent set of views to compare instances, spot outliers, and drill into the focus areas that need attention.

• Fleet-first design: Start with an estate-wide view, then drill down to a specific site/cluster using the seven tabs in the workbook.
• Operational consistency: Standard dashboards help teams align on “what good looks like” across environments, update trends, health check results and more.
• Actionable insights: Identify hotspots and trends early so you can prioritize remediation and plan health remediation, updates and workload capacity with confidence.

What insights does it provide?

Azure Local LENS is built to help you answer the questions that matter at scale, such as:

• Fleet scale overview and connection status: How many Azure Local instances do you have, and what are their connection, health and update status?
• Workload deployment trends: Where have you deployed Azure Local VMs and AKS Arc clusters, how many do you have in total, are they connected and in a healthy state?
• Top issues to prioritize: What are the common signals across your estate that deserve operational focus, such as update health checks, extension failures or Azure Resource Bridge connectivity issues?
• Updates: What is your overall update compliance status for Solution and SBE updates? What is the average, standard deviation or 95^th percentile update duration run times for your fleet?
• Drilldown workflow: After spotting an outlier, what does the instance-level view show, so you can act or link directly to Azure portal for more actions and support?

Get started in minutes

If you are managing Azure Local instances, give Azure Local LENS a try and see how quickly a fleet-wide view can help with day-to-day management, helping to surface trends & actionable insights. The workbook is an open-source, community-driven project, which can be accessed using a public GitHub repository, which includes full step-by-step instructions for setup at https://aka.ms/AzureLocalLENS.

Most teams can deploy the workbook and start exploring insights in a matter of minutes. (depending on your environment).

An example of the “Azure Local Instances” tab:

How teams are using fleet dashboards like LENS

• Weekly fleet review: Use a standard set of views to review top outliers and trend shifts, then assign follow-ups.
• Update planning: Identify clusters with system health check failures, and prioritize resolving the issues based on frequency of the issue category.
• Update progress: Review clusters update status (InProgress, Failed, Success) and take action based on trends and insights from real-time data.
• Baseline validation: Spot clusters that consistently differ from the norm—can be a sign of configuration or environmental difference, such as network access, policies, operational procedures or other factors.

Feedback and what’s next

This workbook is a community driven, open source project intended to be practical and easy to adopt. The project is not a Microsoft‑supported offering. If you encounter any issues, have feedback, or a new feature request, please raise an Issue on the GitHub repository, so we can track discussions, prioritize improvements, and keep updates transparent for everyone.

Author Bio

Neil Bird is a Principal Program Manager in the Azure Edge & Platform Engineering team at Microsoft. His background is in Azure and hybrid / sovereign cloud infrastructure, specialising in operational excellence and automation. He is passionate about helping customers deploy and manage cloud solutions successfully using Azure and Azure Edge technologies.