Features of Network Watcher
1. Flow logs: Network security group flow logs help us build a deeper insight into patterns of our network traffic. It helps us gather data for monitoring, auditing, and compliance with network security profiles.
2. Automation of remote network monitoring: We can monitor and diagnose the issue without logging in to our virtual machines by triggering packet capture. We can trigger packet capture by setting alerts. We can use that to gain real-time performance information at the packet level and investigate in detail for better diagnoses.
3. Diagnose VPN connectivity issues: The detailed logs help in better investigation of the connection and VPN gateway issues and diagnose them.
4. Troubleshoot connection: It helps us identify and troubleshoot network connectivity and performance issues that might occur in Azure.
5. VPN Diagnostics: VPN diagnostics can be used to troubleshoot connections and gateways. It provides us with summary information in the portal and more detailed information in log files which includes things like connection statistics, packet drops, buffers, memory, CPU, and events.
6. Verify IP flow: It is mainly used to verify if the security rules are correctly applied and whether there are any connectivity issues from or to the internet or to the on-premises environment or not.
7. Next hop: It is used to check if the traffic is being correctly directed to the required designation. This helps in verifying whether the network routing is correctly configured. Whenever we create a virtual network, Azure automatically creates several different default outbound routes for network traffic. This outbound traffic for the resources in the virtual network is routed based on Azure default routes. We may check this and override the routes or create additional routes as per our needs.
8. Visualize the network topology: Network Watcher helps us to generate a visual diagram of the resources in a virtual network and the relationships between them by generating a graphical display of our Azure virtual network, its resources, its interconnections, and the connections between them. This makes it easy for a new administrator to understand the virtual network and troubleshoot it.
What is Microsoft Azure Network Watcher?
Pre-Requisite: Azure
In an on-premises network, it may happen that due to an error in configuration, there can be problems that become difficult to identify and troubleshoot. Similarly, when we create a complex and flexible setup to meet our needs in Azure that connects many virtual machines (VMs) it may lead to connectivity issues. Network watcher helps us, in this case, to diagnose and troubleshoot the issue at a network scenario level.