Azure Load Balancer

The plugin enumerates the load balancers of a subscription, or of a single resource group when discovery is narrowed to one, and reads their Azure Monitor metrics. A Discovery task creates one agent per load balancer, or a single target agent when per-load-balancer creation is disabled; in consolidated mode the load balancer name is prepended to each module name.

Metric families are enabled independently: data path availability and health probe status, byte, packet and SYN traffic, allocated and used SNAT ports with the SNAT connection count, the backend pool host count calculated from the load balancer configuration, and a load balancer count. The plugin reads the metrics from Azure Monitor and retries temporary Azure errors and HTTP 429 responses up to a configurable number of attempts.

Authentication uses a Microsoft Entra service principal stored as an Azure credential in the Pandora FMS credential store. Generated agents can be created in autodisable mode, and allow and deny regular expressions filter the final module names. The plugin only reads load balancer state and metrics and never changes the Microsoft Azure configuration.

- Create Pandora FMS agents for Azure Load Balancer resources through a Discovery task.

- Monitor data path availability and health probe status per load balancer.

- Monitor byte, packet and SYN traffic, and SNAT port and connection usage.

- Monitor the backend pool host count and the load balancer count.

- Choose between one agent per load balancer and a single consolidated agent.

- Data path availability

- Health probe status

- Byte, packet and SYN traffic

- Allocated and used SNAT ports

- SNAT connections

- Backend pool host count

- Load balancer count

- Load balancer reachability

A Discovery task runs the plugin with a stored Microsoft Entra credential. The plugin lists the load balancers of the subscription, or of the selected resource group, and reads their Azure Monitor metrics. With per-load-balancer creation enabled, each discovered load balancer becomes an agent named with an optional prefix; when it is disabled, every module is attached to a single target agent with the load balancer name prepended to the module names. A cached entity list can be reused between runs, and a load balancer that is no longer discoverable keeps its connection module at 0 until the cache is rebuilt. The generated agents and modules are returned for the Discovery task to create them.

- Load balancer state and traffic become visible in the same platform as the rest of the monitored infrastructure.

- Removes the manual creation and maintenance of agents and modules for each load balancer.

- Newly discovered load balancers are incorporated on the next task run without reconfiguring the task.

- Availability, traffic and SNAT data are consolidated into one view per load balancer.

- Network and cloud operations teams that monitor the health and traffic of load balancers in Microsoft Azure.

- Environments where Azure networking is watched alongside other cloud and on-premise infrastructure.

- Teams that need to detect unavailable backends or exhausted SNAT ports before they affect users.

- A Pandora FMS server with Discovery enabled and a console to define the task.

- A Microsoft Azure subscription containing the load balancers to monitor.

- A Microsoft Entra service principal stored as an Azure credential in the Pandora FMS credential store, with read access to the load balancers and their Azure Monitor metrics.

- A target agent group whose identifier is greater than 0; the `All` group cannot be used.

- A monitoring interval for the generated agents.

Plugin version 1.0. Communicates with the Microsoft Azure Network and Azure Monitor endpoints. Distributed as a self-contained Discovery application, so no additional runtime has to be installed for a normal run.

- Sovereign or custom Azure clouds are not validated; the plugin uses the public Azure endpoints.

- No host operating system compatibility has been validated.

- Allow and deny regular expressions are matched against the final module name, which in consolidated mode includes the load balancer name.

- A load balancer that is no longer discoverable keeps its agent and reports its connection module as 0 until the entity cache is rebuilt.

- The backend pool host count and the load balancer count are calculated by the plugin and not read from Azure Monitor.

- The plugin only reads load balancer state and metrics and does not change the Microsoft Azure configuration.