Plotting Azure Metrics in PowerShell Console Graphs 

Hello! This is a quick blog post to demonstrate how to plot your Azure Metrics of any Resource in your PowerShell Console using the “Graphical Module” I’ve written sometimes back.

Let’s take a Virtual Machine as an example and navigate to the Metric section

Here we can choose a Metric Namespace and a Metric Name to see that metric plotted onto a chart as demonstrated in the following image.

Now, Let’s plot these metric datapoints into your PowerShell Console, but before that make sure you are logged into Azure and you have ‘Graphical’ Module installed on your machine. If not you can install it from PowerShell Gallery in case you are using PowerShell v5 and above. Post-installation make sure to import the module as well in the current PowerShell session.

Once that is done, use the below code and provide input values like Resource Name, Metric Name, Time Grain, Start and End time which is required to get metrics from Azure.

Now, use the Get-AZMetric cmdlet from the ‘Az’ module to download the metric data ( Percentage CPU - Average ) in your PowerShell Session and convert them into [int] values so that it can be plotted on an ASCII graph.

Now, we have the datapoint and it can be simply plotted in the console using the Show-Graph cmdlet from ‘Graphical’ Module using the following code snippet:

Plotting Azure metrics directly into PowerShell consoles is helpful in monitoring applications all from the comfort of shell 🙂

FULL CODE

~ Author of “PowerShell Guide to Python“,  and currently writing a Book on “Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)“

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