How — and why — to disable Network Watcher using PowerShell

It happened to me a couple of times already. When you are working with the Network Watcher feature (spoiler alert, new article coming up on this soon), there is one option at the subscription level only (let me get that clear for you --  one option ONLY) to enable monitoring on all-region, but nothing to roll back. If you want to disable Network Watcher using the Azure Portal, you have to expand your subscription and click on each region that you don’t want to monitor and then Disable network watcher, which will give a refresh and collapse the list containing all regions of the subscription.

Let’s say you have two regions to monitor, and you made that mistake. You would spend at least 30 minutes complaining and another 30 minutes to perform the tasks. No worries:  PowerShell and the Get-AZNetworkWatcher command to the rescue!

We can run the following cmdlet to list all regions that are being monitored and the second cmdlet to remove all regions and switch back to Disable Network Watcher.

Get-AZNetworkWatcher | Select Name,Location,ProvisioningState
Get-AZNetworkWatcher | Remove-AZNetworkWatcher

After executing the above cmdlet, the result will be the feature showing as disabled in the Azure Portal. Time to expand your subscription and pick the region that you want to monitor.

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