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Azure Disk Snapshots Management Control Plane: Simplifying VM Backup and Recovery

July 18, 2025

azure backup disaster recovery snapshots azure disk control plane management

Managing backups and disaster recovery for Azure Virtual Machines can be complex, especially at scale. The Azure Disk Snapshots Management Control Plane is a solution that automates and centralizes the management of VM disk snapshots, making backup, retention, and recovery operations seamless for sysadmins and DevOps teams.

Key Capabilities

  • Automated Daily Snapshots: Automatically creates incremental snapshots for all VMs tagged for backup, ensuring up-to-date protection with minimal manual effort.
  • Cross-Region Replication: Snapshots are copied to a secondary Azure region, enabling robust disaster recovery and failover.
  • Retention Policy Enforcement: Old snapshots are purged based on configurable policies, optimizing storage costs and compliance.
  • Bulk VM Restore: Supports restoring individual or multiple VMs from snapshots, including bulk failover scenarios.
  • Monitoring and Observability: Integrated with Azure Monitor and Log Analytics, providing full visibility into snapshot operations and health.

How It Works

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The solution leverages Azure Functions and Azure Storage for a scalable, event-driven architecture:

  • A timer-triggered function scans for VMs with the smcp-backup=on tag and enqueues snapshot jobs.
  • Worker functions create and replicate snapshots, manage retention, and log all operations.
  • Monitoring is provided via an Azure Monitor workbook for real-time insights.

Observability and Monitoring

The solution integrates with Azure Monitor and Log Analytics, providing comprehensive observability through a custom Azure Monitor workbook that visualizes snapshot operations, including:

  • Summary Overview: Quickly detect any issues with snapshot operations.

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  • Snapshot Creation: Track the status and history of snapshot creation for each VM.

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  • Replication Status: Monitor the replication of snapshots to secondary regions.

  • Retention Compliance: Ensure compliance with retention policies by tracking snapshot deletions.

  • Error Tracking: Identify and troubleshoot issues with snapshot operations.

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Who Is It For?

This solution is ideal for organizations seeking a reliable, automated, and observable way to manage VM disk backups and disaster recovery in Azure, based on disk snapshots, with minimal manual intervention.

Getting Started

You can set up the snapshots management control plane solution following the step-by-step instructions provided in this GitHub repository.