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Azure Network Watcher is a suite of monitoring, diagnostic, and analytics tools designed to help you understand, diagnose, and gain insights into your Azure networking. It is your primary toolkit for troubleshooting connectivity issues, analysing traffic patterns, and ensuring your network is healthy and secure.
Network Watcher is a regional service automatically enabled in every Azure region where you have networking resources. It provides tools across three categories:
| Category | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Monitoring | Visualise and track network topology and health. |
| Diagnostics | Troubleshoot connectivity, routing, and security issues. |
| Traffic analytics | Analyse traffic flow patterns and detect anomalies. |
The Topology view provides a visual map of your network resources and their relationships — VNets, subnets, NICs, VMs, NSGs, load balancers, and gateways.
This interactive diagram helps you:
Connection Monitor continuously tests connectivity between sources and destinations, alerting you when connections fail or latency exceeds thresholds.
Supported sources:
Supported destinations:
Use cases:
NSG Flow Logs capture metadata about traffic flowing through Network Security Groups:
Flow logs are stored in an Azure Storage account as JSON files. They are the raw data source for Traffic Analytics.
VNet Flow Logs are the next generation, capturing traffic at the VNet level (not just NSG), including traffic between VMs in the same subnet.
IP Flow Verify tests whether a packet is allowed or denied by your NSGs. You specify:
It tells you:
This is the fastest way to diagnose "why can't VM A reach VM B?" problems.
Next Hop shows you the next hop for a packet leaving a specific VM. This helps you understand and troubleshoot routing, especially when you have:
The result shows the next hop type (VNet, internet, virtual appliance, etc.) and the next hop IP address.
Effective Security Rules aggregates all NSG rules applied to a NIC — from both subnet-level and NIC-level NSGs — and shows the effective set of rules after combining and ordering them.
This is essential when you have NSGs at both levels and need to understand the resulting security posture.
Connection Troubleshoot performs a one-time connectivity check between a source and destination, reporting:
Think of it as a cloud-native traceroute with NSG awareness.
Packet Capture records packets on a VM's NIC for analysis. Captures are stored as .cap files (compatible with Wireshark).
Use cases:
You can filter captures by:
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