Announcing Public Preview for Essential Machine Management

Managing servers and VMs across Azure, on premises, and multi-cloud environments often means turning on core capabilities—monitoring, updates, inventory, and configuration—through separate setup experiences. We’ve heard feedback that this makes it harder to get visibility into machine state and take actions.

We’re excited to announce the public preview of Essential Machine Management experience within Compute Infrastructure Hub—a new entry point in Azure that streamlines onboarding for machines at scale and enables basic management capabilities. Start once at subscription scope, get a clear view of what’s turned on, and move from setup to operations faster across your Azure and cloud and hybrid estate.

What is Essential Machine Management?

Essential Machine Management is a centralized onboarding experience that helps customers enroll their machines into a set of selected cloud-native management services from Azure in a simple, scalable way,

Instead of enabling monitoring, updates, inventory, and configuration independently per machine, Essential Machine Management allows you to enroll entire subscriptions at once, including both Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Arc–enabled servers. These services are pre-configured with best practices, enabling customers with out-of-the-box value right away.

Once enrolled, current and future machines in the selected subscriptions are automatically onboarded to the enabled management services, helping ensure consistent visibility and operational coverage from day one.

What management capabilities are enabled?

Using Essential Machine Management, you can quickly onboard machines to multiple Azure management capabilities, including:

• Monitoring insights and recommended alerts for machine health and performance
• Azure Update Manager to help keep machines secure and compliant
• Change tracking and inventory for visibility and auditability
• Machine configuration for managing in-machine configuration, compliance and security
• Azure Security baseline policy is a set of tailored rules to assess your machine's security posture

These services help keep your infrastructure secure and healthy.

How much does it cost?

Azure VMs: For Azure Virtual Machines only, capabilities enabled by Essential Machine Management are provided at no additional charge.

Azure Arc-enabled servers:

• For Azure Arc-enabled servers with Windows Server Software Assurance, Windows Server PayGo, and Windows Server Extended Security Updates, capabilities enabled by Essential Machine Management are provided at no additional charge.
• For all other Arc-enabled servers, Essential Machine Management will be priced at $9 per server per month once billing is enabled. See more details here.

Getting started

If you manage Azure VMs or Arc-enabled servers and are looking to simplify how you onboard and manage machines at scale, Essential Machine Management feature is now available for you to try in public preview. Check out the preview in the Azure Portal under Compute infrastructure --> Monitoring + Operations --> Essential Machine Management (preview):

Check out Essential Machine Management now and reach out to machineenrollmentsupport@microsoft.com for any feedback or support. Learn more about Essential Machine Management here.