Monitoring is an important part of all IT operations, and knowing when something fails is crucial. Also knowing before end-users starts calling is even better!
Microsoft has released a new feature in Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center (MEM) which could help with this called Alerts, which is currently in public preview for Windows 365 features.
With Alerts you can setup notifications, both in the MEM admin center but also through email. This would allow you to get the information and take action as soon as something happens.
There are today three types of alerts you can configure:
- Azure network connection failure
- Upload failure for custom images
- Provisioning failure impacting Cloud PCs
Set up your alerts
Setting up your alerts are really simple. Start by browsing to the Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center (https://endpoint.microsoft.com).
Then navigate to Tenant Administration > Alerts (Preview) > Alert rules. This is where you will see available alerts, configure and enable them.
Click the alert rule you want to configure, in this case we will configure the “Provisioning failure impacting Cloud PCs” alert.
You have three sections to configure: Conditions, Settings and, Notifications.
Under Conditions you can specify how many events need to happen before an alert is triggered. For this alert we can either choose a number of Cloud PCs or a percentage of Cloud PC needs to fail before we get an alert. I would consider the suggested setting in this case to be good, since I want to know if one or more Cloud PCs fail.
Next part is Settings where we need to select the severity of the alert and the status of the alert. Microsofts recomendation is to clasify this as critical, which sounds like a good setting and we will set the status to On since we want to enable this alert.
Last and final part is the notifications, if you want to get a notification in the portal and by email. By enabling “Portal pop-up” a notification will show up in the portal if a provisioning fails.
The email part is for where an email notification should be sent. You can add multiple recipients, and I’ve added my Service Desk email adress in this instance, since I want them to get the information. This could also be set to an administrator or the operations team for Cloud PCs, that totally up to you!
After doing all our settings, click “Apply” at the bottom of the screen and your rule will be enabled.
You can at any time easily turn on or off an alert rule by checking the check-box next to it and use the “On” and “Off” buttons.
And now you just need to sit and wait for the alerts to hopefully never show up!
Since making the Cloud PC provisioning isn’t something I’ve figured out how to do on command, I’m not able to do on command I don’t have any screenshots of the alerts.
If you want to see some screen shots of this, I suggest you head over to my fellow MVP Morten Pedholts blog, who actually got a machine to fail in provisioning.
Final thoughts
Alerts in MEM has great potential, and I can really see this expanding going forward to other things than just Windows 365 and the three alerts we are limited to today. Really looking forward to see how this feature will evolve!
