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eSHARS Operations

Azure VM Troubleshooting

WAD Azure Monitor Pipeline Disabled

Message:

Though AzureMonitor was configured to be used in WAD config, WADVmInfo was not available. Hence disabling Azure Monitor pipeline.

What it means: The Windows Azure Diagnostics (WAD) extension is configured to send data to Azure Monitor, but it can’t authenticate because the VM’s managed identity isn’t set up or doesn’t have the right permissions. WAD falls back to writing diagnostics to the storage account only — data won’t appear in Azure Monitor Metrics or trigger metric-based alerts.

Impact:

  • Diagnostics still flow to the storage account (not a total outage)
  • Azure Monitor Metrics, Metrics Explorer, and metric-based alerts will not receive data from this VM

Fix:

  1. Enable a system-assigned managed identity on the VM:

    Terminal window
    az vm identity assign --resource-group <RG> --name <VM_NAME>

  2. Grant the identity the “Monitoring Metrics Publisher” role:

    Terminal window
    az role assignment create \
      --assignee <VM_PRINCIPAL_ID> \
      --role "Monitoring Metrics Publisher" \
      --scope /subscriptions/<SUB>/resourceGroups/<RG>/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/<VM_NAME>

  3. Restart the WAD extension (or the VM) so it picks up the identity.