Get azure vm creation/provision date

Question

_{Friday, August 23, 2013 10:05 PM}

Hi,

I'm trying to find out a way to gather the information of when each of my Azure virtual machines were created.

In the azure web portal I do not have such info.

By Powershell, the Get-AzureVM command does not provide me such information.

Can anyone tell me, or help me, finding a way to get such information? Is it possible?

Thank you,

All replies (2)

_{Saturday, August 24, 2013 1:36 PM ✅Answered}

Hi Zigoze,

The portal does show Created for a cloud service in the Dashboard of a Cloud Service, but that is not shown for a specific VM (which you can see with Azure PowerShell with Get-AzureService <cloud service name> | select DateCreated).

When you do a Quick Create of a VM, that will always create a new cloud service, so the time created would be the same for VM and cloud service. But since you can add multiple VMs to a cloud service, you can't always rely on that.

On the VM's Dashboard in the portal, at the bottom if you look at the VHD column, the VHD name includes the date the disk was created as part of the name, though this is only true for VMs created from an image. If the VM was created from a disk, the name could be anything. You can get that OS disk name in Azure PowerShell with Get-AzureVM <cloud service name> <VM name> | Get-AzureOSDisk | select medialink.

Operation Logs under Management Services in the portal lets you search the last 30 days for operations, so if the VM was created in the last month, you can find evidence of the operation there (for example CreateHostedService and CreateDeployment operations).

For Windows VMs created from an image, the timestamp on WaSetup.log and WaSetup.xml in C:\Windows\panther\ reflect when the VM was provisioned.

Thanks,
Craig

_{Saturday, August 24, 2013 7:36 PM}

thank you very much... in our case, looking at the cloud service creation date is good enough because we have each vm in its own cloud service. But looking at the creation date of the operating system disk is also a good way to confirm it.

great help. regards.