🚀 Live VM Migration & Real-Time Monitoring on Microsoft Azure

This repository contains a complete cloud infrastructure project where I implemented live VM disk migration and real-time system monitoring using Microsoft Azure, Prometheus, Grafana, and Node Exporter.

📝 Project completed 3–4 weeks ago | 📤 Documented now for public sharing

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📁 Project Overview

Feature	Description
🧠 Goal	Monitor VM health and simulate live migration
☁️ Cloud Platform	Microsoft Azure
📊 Monitoring Stack	Prometheus + Grafana + Node Exporter
💻 VMs Used	VM1 (Monitor), VM2 (Target), VM3 (Migrated)
⚙️ Automation Tools	Azure CLI, Bash, YAML

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🧱 Architecture

VM1 (Prometheus + Grafana)  <-- monitors --  VM2 (Node Exporter)
                                   ↑
                          [Disk attached from VM3]

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🛠️ Steps Performed

✅ 1. Provision VMs on Azure

az vm create --resource-group MyResourceGroup --name VM1 --image Ubuntu2204 ...
az vm create --name VM2 ...
az vm create --name VM3 ...

✅ 2. Setup Prometheus & Grafana on VM1

• Installed via apt
• Configured scrape targets
• Created Grafana dashboards (CPU, RAM, Disk, Uptime)

✅ 3. Simulate VM Disk Migration (VM3 ➜ VM2)

az vm deallocate --name VM3
az snapshot create --resource-group MyResourceGroup --name VM3_Snapshot --source <VM3_DISK_ID>
az disk create --resource-group MyResourceGroup --name MigratedDisk --source VM3_Snapshot
az vm disk attach --resource-group MyResourceGroup --vm-name VM2 --name MigratedDisk

✅ 4. Configure Node Exporter on VMs

wget https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/releases/download/v*/node_exporter-*.linux-amd64.tar.gz
./node_exporter &

✅ 5. Create Alert Rules in Prometheus

groups:
- name: example_alert
  rules:
  - alert: HighCPUUsage
    expr: rate(node_cpu_seconds_total{mode="user"}[1m]) > 0.7
    for: 1m
    labels:
      severity: critical
    annotations:
      summary: "High CPU usage detected"
      description: "CPU usage > 80% for over 1 min."

✅ 6. Stress Testing

stress-ng --cpu 2 --timeout 60s

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📸 Screenshots (I’ve detailed every step, command, and dashboard in my full Medium article with screenshots.)

Component	Description
Azure Portal	3 VMs provisioned
Prometheus UI	Alerts visible at /alerts
Grafana Dashboard	CPU, RAM, Disk panels for VM1 & VM2
CLI	Disk migration commands

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📊 Grafana Panel Metrics

• CPU Usage:

rate(node_cpu_seconds_total{mode="user"}[5m])

• Memory %:

(node_memory_MemTotal_bytes - node_memory_MemAvailable_bytes) / node_memory_MemTotal_bytes * 100

• Disk I/O:

rate(node_disk_bytes_read_total[5m])

• Uptime:

node_time_seconds - node_boot_time_seconds

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🎓 Key Learnings

• Performed disk-based VM migration using Azure CLI
• Configured Prometheus to collect metrics across nodes
• Built real-time Grafana dashboards
• Triggered alerts and visualized usage during stress

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📖 Blog & LinkedIn Post

• 📘 Medium Blog
• 💼 LinkedIn Post

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🛡️ Disclaimer

This was a test/study project built on Azure Student Subscription. Please ensure proper shutdown of all services to avoid billing.

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🤝 Let's Connect

Open to feedback, collaboration, or discussion around DevOps, observability, or cloud-native projects!