SOLVED: Missing Windows Server Agent Heartbeat – Check Azure Arc Status

UPDATED: Aug 17 2023

Machines in Azure have a health service that sends a heartbeat notice to an Azure management server to confirm the machine is still responding. After a number of failures, Azure Arc flags an alert and IT staff like you and I get to work.

Note that Azure Arc enabled servers can be connected to Azure Sentinel, so it is often thought of as an Azure Sentinel service but it is actually Azure Arc.

If you want to use the Windows GUI to see how the Azure Arc heart beat is working, check (and I just reboot) AZURE HYBRID INSTANCE METADATA SERVICE, GUEST CONFIGURATION ARC SERVICE, and GUEST CONFIGURATION EXTENSION SERVICE in SERVICES.MSC .

If you need to verify that Azure Arc is still working simply:

1. Open a PowerShell or Windows Terminal as an Administrator
2. Type azcmagent show
   • look at the status of the GC SERVICE, EXTENSION SERVICE and the AGENT SERVICE
3. Type azcmagent check for more details

If the plugins are installed, you can also run the Azure Arc Agent Troubleshooter:

1. Open a PowerShell or Windows Terminal as an Administrator
2. Change directory to C:\Packages \Plugins \Microsoft.AzureMonitorWindowsAgent \x.x.x.x \Troubleshooter
3. Type AgentTroubleshooter.exe --ama (NOTE: There are TWO dashes) and press the ENTER key

Note that there are four failures which are normal and can safely be ignored as shown in the screenshot above.

Reinstall Azure Arc Agent

If the two health checks above do not tell you what’s wrong, you might be better off to just uninstall and reinstall the Azure Arc agent. We were a bit surprised to find that Microsoft makes the last few versions of the Azure Arc Agent available for download so we were able to roll back to a previous version and work around a problem.

Note that as your arc does not uninstall cleanly and that you need to also delete a bunch of folders after the uninstall, before you install the new one, or you are likely to still have problems. We have an article explaining how to reinstall Azure Arc HERE.

You can download current and previous versions of the Azure Arc agent directly from Microsoft HERE.

How To Troubleshoot Azure Arc Monitor Agent

For full details on how to troubleshoot the Azure Monitor Agent, click HERE for a very good Microsoft article.