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Microsoft Azure – Using the Azure Activity Log

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In the given article we will get introduced to Azure activity logs. In this article, we will go through the activity log and let you know how to access it and what you can use it for. The activity log is really great to tell the who, what, and when for operations in your Azure resources. 

Implementation:

There’s a range of data that you can look at in your activity log from Azure Resource Manager operation logs to updates in your service health events. So, there are different ways where you can get to the activity log. One is by going to all services over here. And then you can find the activity log, favorite it, and it’ll show up in your navigation bar. 

You can also go to monitor and select the activity log from the table of contents on the left. 

Or you could simply go to a resource, such as this VM right here, where you will also find an activity log in your table of contents. And the advantage of going to a resource and then clicking on the activity log is that all your filters will already be prefiltered down to that particular resource. 

So, you can see here subscription, resource group, and the resource name are already set to this particular VM. If you wanted to change these filters, you can easily edit what’s already here or click on add filter, and then select a filter type that you would like, such as operation, and then you can select a particular operation.

Let’s create a role assignment in this case. Click it, select, and then it will filter down to only show create role assignment events. If you would like to see everything at a quick glance, you could click on the quick insights button, which will open a panel of premade filters that are filtered by things like errors, alerts fired, or role assignments. It will show you the number of everything that happened in the past 24 hours. 

You can see here on these particular logs, you have an arrow to the left of this. This means that these logs are grouped together by correlation ID and then sorted in chronological order. You can also get some more information out of your logs by editing the columns of this table, which you can do in the top left button, and then by selecting whatever columns you would like to see or would like not to see.

Another way you can see more information is by clicking on a particular log, which will open the more info panel. And this will show you a lot more detail about your log and will even allow you to drill down into the JSON where you can see everything at the most granular level.

From this more info panel, you can also add an activity log alert or create a new support request. So, the activity log is really great because it enables you to see your events happening on every resource that you have. 

So, you are in a VM right now, but you could just as easily be in a web app where you can see activity log here as well. Or, you could also be in a storage account where, again, you can find an activity log in the same place.

Not only that, but you can also click on the container that these resources are contained in, and this container itself will also have activity logs in its ToC, so, in the left-most panel on the table of contents. And here, instead of having the filters being filtered down to the most granular resource level, you will only be filtered down to the resource group. 

So, you will see all the events that are happening in that resource group to those resources in there as well. It’s always the second item in every resource type on Azure. So, that functionality’s available throughout the entire platform. 


Last Updated : 03 Apr, 2023
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