Azure Virtual Machine Boot Diagnostics

This little feature has assisted me many times!

Azure Virtual Machine boot diagnostics gives you a log view and screenshot of your Virtual Machine (VM) from the hypervisor level.

VM not accessible? This feature may just help you!

Checking this feature can confirm if your VM is having issues stopping you from connecting successfully.

Enabling the boot diagnostics setting

Select the VM you want to have it enabled for and select Boot Diagnostics

Select settings and change status to ON -> select Storage Account or create a new one as below

Save, can take 10 minutes for screenshots and log output to appear in your Storage Account

Windows output

Serial Log

 [2J [1;1H [2J [H<?xml version="1.0"?>
<machine-info>
<name>tamops-vm1</name>
<guid>d370c081-60be-45bb-ba98-584e146c9c6f</guid>
<processor-architecture>AMD64</processor-architecture>
<os-version>10.0</os-version>
<os-build-number>14393</os-build-number>
<os-product>Windows Server 2016 Datacenter</os-product>
<os-service-pack>None</os-service-pack>
</machine-info>
 [2J [2J [1;1H [0m [22m [25m [27m [40m [37m                                                                                 [2;1H                                                                                 [3;1HComputer is booting, SAC started and initialized.                                [4;1H                                                                                 [5;1HUse the "ch -?" command for information about using channels.                    [6;1HUse the "?" command for general help.

Screenshot

Linux Output

Serial Log

[15109.556802] cloud-init[827]: Cloud-init v. 19.4-33-gbb4131a2-0ubuntu1~18.04.1 running 'init-local' at Fri, 06 Mar 2020 14:16:19 +0000. Up 22.90 seconds.
[ [0;32m  OK   [0m] Started Initial cloud-init job (pre-networking).
[ [0;32m  OK   [0m] Reached target Network (Pre).
         Starting Network Service...
[ [0;32m  OK   [0m] Started Network Service.
         Starting Network Name Resolution...
         Starting Wait for Network to be Configured...
[ [0;32m  OK   [0m] Started Network Name Resolution.
[ [0;32m  OK   [0m] Reached target Network.
[ [0;32m  OK   [0m] Reached target Host and Network Name Lookups.
[ [0;32m  OK   [0m] Started Wait for Network to be Configured.
         Starting Initial cloud-init job (metadata service crawler)...
[15111.632460] cloud-init[1026]: Cloud-init v. 19.4-33-gbb4131a2-0ubuntu1~18.04.1 running 'init' at Fri, 06 Mar 2020 18:27:48 +0000. Up 15111.31 seconds.
[15111.648217] cloud-init[1026]: ci-info: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Net device info+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
[15111.656728] cloud-init[1026]: ci-info: +--------+------+-----------------------------+---------------+--------+-------------------+

Screenshot