Forum Discussion
KristofferAxelssonACC
Jan 07, 2025Copper Contributor
Azure Monitor AMA Migration helper workbook question for subscriptions with AKS clusters
Hi,
In an ongoing project, I've been looking into helping a customer updating their agents from the Microsoft Monitoring Agent (MMA) to the new Azure Monitoring Agent (AMA) that consolidates installation and the previous Log Analytics agent, Telegraf agent, diagnostics extension in Azure Event Hubs, Storage etc., and then configure Data Collection Rules (DCRs) to collect data using the new agent.
One of the first steps is of course to identify which resources are affected and that needs to be migrated. There are multiple tools to identify the resources such as this PowerShell script as well as the built-in AMA Migration workbook in Azure Monitor, which is what I used as the initial option at the start of the AMA migration process.
When running the notebook, it will list all VMs, VMSSs etc. in the subscription that do not have the AMA agent installed, e.g., through an Azure Policy or automatically by having configured a DCR, or that do have the old MMA installed, and thus needs to be migrated.
In Azure, Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), as Kubernetes is a rather specific hosting service, almost like its own mini-ecosystem in regard to networking, storage, scaling etc., enables access and control of the underlying infrastructure composing the cluster created by the AKS and its master node, providing the potential fine-grain and granular control of these resources for IT administrators, power users etc. However, in most typical use cases the underlying AKS infrastructure resources should not be modified as it could break configured SLOs.
When running the Azure Monitor built-in AMA migration workbook, it includes all resources by default that do not have the AMA installed already, no matter what type of resource it is, including potential underlying cluster infrastructure resources created by AKS in the "MC_" resource group(s), such as virtual machine scale sets handling the creation and scaling of nodes and node pools of an AKS cluster. Perhaps the underlying AKS infrastructure resources could be excluded from the AMA migration results of the Azure Monitor workbook by default, or if underlying non-AMA migrated AKS infrastructure resources are found, perhaps accompanied with a text describing potential remediation steps for AMA agent migration for AKS cluster infrastructure resources. Has anyone encountered the same issue and if so how did you work around it? Would be great to hear some input and if there's already some readily available solutions/workaround out there already (if not, I've been thinking perhaps making a proposed PR here with a filter and exclusion added to the default workbook e.g. here https://github.com/microsoft/AzureMonitorCommunity/tree/master/Azure%20Services/Azure%20Monitor/Agents/Migration%20Tools/Migration%20Helper%20Workbook). Thanks!
- Clive_WatsonBronze Contributor
I'd go with the PR route (assuming the authors approve) or just clone and run your own version especially as this has existed for a while and this hasn't been asked for (AFAIK).