If you have ever rebooted a virtual machine and feel like you are in the dark to it’s current state, you aren’t alone. Thankfully, Azure provides a number of tools to aid in your experience in the cloud when it comes to “reboot darkness”. Boot diagnostics allows you to see the state of your virtual machine as it boots up. This is very similar to looking at the console in VMWare vCenter, you can see if the box is at least up and functional. Essentially, it collects serial log information from the virtual machine as well as screen shots. This helps to diagnose startup issues.