Microsoft has announced a new monitoring service within its Azure Site Recovery, which will enable enterprises to have a deeper visibility into their business continuity plans.
The new comprehensive monitoring capabilities are aimed to integrate disaster recovery (DR) with Azure so that the businesses can have a DR plan ready for all their IT applications.
Azure Site Recovery helps customers to protect their mission critical IT systems, maintain compliance, and be confident about protection of business data during any disaster. However, running a business continuity plan is a little complex, and the only way to check whether the plan is working or not is by performing periodic tests.
But these periodic tests need to be performed on a regular basis because of variables like configuration drift and resource availability. The comprehensive monitoring addresses this issue, and allows deep visibility into business continuity objectives through a vault overview page. 
The vault overview page includes a dashboard which allows in-depth visibility into specific components to detect error symptoms, and provides a guide for remediation. It offers a simplified troubleshooting experience, letting users know the current health of business continuity plan, as well as the current preparation status to react to any disaster, by assessing a broad range of replication parameters.
Users can switch between the dashboard pages for Site Recovery and Backup using the toggle switch on overview page. The readiness model in the dashboard helps in monitoring the resource availability and suggest configurations on the basis of best practices.
Microsoft has also updated Azure Site Recovery service for VMware to Azure replication, with a new OVF (Open Virtualization Template). The OVF simplifies the getting-started experience, and enables the replication of virtual machines in less than half an hour. The configuration server now consists of a new web portal which acts as a single point for all the actions taken on configurations server.
The new update of Azure Site Recovery will use VMware tools to install or update mobility services on all the protected VMware VMs. The users won’t need to open firewall rules for Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), and File and Printer Sharing services, before the replication of VMs from VMware environments into Azure. This will make the deployment of Azure Site Recovery mobility service easier.
Also read: Microsoft’s Accelerated Networking for virtual machines now generally available
The comprehensive monitoring for Azure Site Recovery is generally available now. The VMware tools based mobility service installation will be available to all the customers who update their configuration servers to version 9.13 and above.
