Background
Many modern Azure services create and destroy virtual machines automatically as part of their normal operation. Examples include:
- Azure Databricks
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
- Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS)
- Other cloud-native and ephemeral workloads
These resources are temporary by design and can scale up and down dynamically multiple times per day.
Current Limitation
SolarWinds Observability Cloud discovers these resources through the Azure integration and counts them as monitored Hosts for licensing purposes.
Currently there is no supported mechanism to:
- Exclude Azure VMs based on Tags
- Exclude Azure VMs based on Resource Groups
- Exclude Azure VMs based on Naming Patterns
- Define inclusion/exclusion rules for dynamically created workloads
As a result, temporary infrastructure resources consume Host licenses although they are not intended to be monitored as individual long-lived servers.
Business Impact
Organizations operating cloud-native Azure workloads may experience:
- Artificially increased Host consumption
- Reduced licensing predictability
- Difficulty monitoring persistent infrastructure while ignoring ephemeral platform components
This affects common enterprise services such as Databricks, AKS worker nodes and VMSS instances.
Requested Enhancement
Provide a supported mechanism within SolarWinds Observability Cloud to exclude discovered Azure resources from Host licensing based on:
- Azure Tags
- Resource Groups
- Naming conventions / regex patterns
- Other Azure metadata attributes
This would allow customers to monitor persistent infrastructure while preventing temporary cloud-native resources from consuming Host licenses.
Use Case
Monitor:
- Business VMs
- Infrastructure VMs
- Application servers
Exclude:
- Databricks cluster VMs
- AKS worker nodes
- VMSS instances used for autoscaling
- Other ephemeral compute resources
