We have seen the built-in capabilities for monitoring and alerting that are available through the portal. If you have a large environment, creating the necessary alerts can obviously be time consuming. Wouldn't it be nice to have a way to automate the creation of alerts? Step up PowerShell. PowerShell is Microsoft's scripting tool of choice and can be used to help you create and manage your alerts in Azure.

Keith Meyer has an excellent blog post on this information on the Microsoft TechNet site (http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithmayer/archive/2014/11/08/scripts-to-tools-automate-monitoring-alert-rules-in-microsoft-azure-with-powershell-and-the-azure-service-management-rest-api.aspx).

We will use Keith's PowerShell function described here to allow you to create an alert on the CPU percentage for one of our Azure-based virtual...