Earlier this month (Sep ‘15) Microsoft announced a new diagnostic capability for VMs running in IaaS – the ability to see serial and console output from a running Virtual Machine. We take this capability for granted when we host our own data center, but having this capability for VM’s running in the public cloud is useful when troubleshooting boot failures.

This capability is available for new and existing version 2.0 virtual machines (aka Azure Resource Manager (ARM) created in the preview portal.

Then toggle the monitoring option

Note, screenshots and output can take up to 10 minutes to appear in your storage account.