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Azure Arc Blog
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Public Preview of Azure Arc Site Manager

nathanparikh's avatar
nathanparikh
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Apr 22, 2024

This week we are excited to announce the Public Preview of Azure Arc site manager. We designed site manager to meet the needs of customers who manage solutions on the adaptive cloud and want to view and monitor their resources according to their physical locations, such as stores, restaurants, and factories. Within site manager, customers can create Arc sites to represent their on-premises environments and see centralized monitoring information across their edge infrastructure.

 

Get Started
You can get started by navigating to site manager within Azure Arc (aka.ms/sitemanager). Sites can be created on a resource group or subscription today, and site manager currently supports Azure Stack HCI, Azure Arc-enabled servers & VMs, Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes, and Azure IoT Operations assets. After site creation, all supported resources automatically appear within the site.

For at-scale scenarios, Arc sites can also be created via Infrastructure-as-Code. To learn more, see aka.ms/iacquickstart.


Site Monitoring Capabilities
Once the site is created, you can see aggregated connectivity, alerts, and updates for the site. Connectivity status comes automatically for supported resources, update status via Azure Update Manager, and alerts through Azure Monitor, which can be configured following this guidance. Additionally, each Arc site has its own page where more detailed troubleshooting and remediation can be performed.

 

Coming Soon
Site manager is currently in public preview, and the following features will come soon:

  • Ability to create sites on a subset of resources in multiple resource groups and/or subscriptions
  • Support for more resource types, including Arc-enabled SQL servers, Arc-enabled VMware vSphere, and some cloud resources
  • Expansion to security and health monitoring

Next Steps
Check out our documentation (aka.ms/sitedocs) and go to the Azure portal to try out Azure Arc site manager today (aka.ms/sitemanager). Additionally, feel free to provide feedback to our team here.

Updated Mar 11, 2025
Version 2.0
azure arc
  • Karl-WE's avatar
    Karl-WE
    MVP
    Sep 11, 2024

    Hi KeithW_AU site manager is the visual management helper here. Currently would leverage Azure Update Management (paid except on Azure VM and Azure Stack HCI Arc VM created via Portal).

     

    Arc Agent will receive an auto updater so you can skip updating packages. Does this answer your points? 

  • KeithW_AU's avatar
    KeithW_AU
    Copper Contributor
    Sep 04, 2024

    Given the deployment options of Arc, does this require a SCCM package edit, or can we update resources with site manager via automation over the top?

    Also, we have a tag for an arc mgmt. strategy - is there an easy migration from tags to sites?

    Will site manager also expand into autopatch scheduling capability?

  • nathanparikh's avatar
    nathanparikh
    Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
    May 15, 2024

    Hi LCKho3693 - thank you for your feedback. Site manager supports update status from Azure Update Manager today. We are continuously looking for ways to expand on how updates are shown within Azure Arc site manager so that we can get closer to full updates management at the site level. We'll take this suggestion into product planning, and please let us know if you have any other thoughts.

  • nathanparikh's avatar
    nathanparikh
    Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
    May 15, 2024

    Hi Karl-WE -Site manager supports resources that exist in supported regions, with a few exceptions. For the following regions, connectivity and update status aren't supported for Arc-enabled machines or Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters:

    • Brazil South
    • UAE North
    • South Africa North

    However, if a site is created on a new RG or subscription, new resources will be created in East US Azure region. We will look into expanding this functionality to be more dynamic so that we can support customers with compliance policies as you mentioned.

  • LCKho3693's avatar
    LCKho3693
    MVP
    May 14, 2024

    Hi nathanparikh,

    The feature allowing us to group, manage and monitor Azure resources by grouping them together. 

     

    Would it be possible that in the near future to have Updates management apply to the "site" ?

     

     

     

  • LCKho3693's avatar
    LCKho3693
    MVP
    May 07, 2024

    Thank you nathanparikh for the sharing. 

    It's a good feature that allowing user to "group" multiple Arc managed resources and manage them accordingly.

     

    Looking forward to test the feature further and give you feedback accordingly. 

  • Karl-WE's avatar
    Karl-WE
    MVP
    Apr 24, 2024

    Do you plan to extend the preview from East US to regions before GA? Currently, due to compliance policies, the deployment for usual Azure subscriptions and CSP Azure subscriptions. Thank you very much for your time and reply. 

  • JamesvandenBerg's avatar
    JamesvandenBerg
    MVP
    Apr 23, 2024

    Thank you nathanparikh for Sharing the Microsoft Azure Arc Site Manager feature with the Community :stareyes:
    Love the Idea of Central Hybrid Management overview and then drill down.

  • Karl-WE's avatar
    Karl-WE
    MVP
    Apr 23, 2024

    That looks so promising, but cannot test. Visual Studio Enterprise Subscriptions are not supported. Possibly because they are using the old billing model?

    - That's fixed. Thank you!