How do I access the serial console and the serial console logs from the Azure portal for a COD VM (Virtual Machine)?

Serial console access for head node VMs on COD Azure

Background: Each BCM COD Azure cluster has a storage account in Azure. For security reasons, the storage account was secured by disabling public access to it. Instead, a solution with Azure private link/private endpoint is used. One downside of this is that the serial console and serial console logs for the head node VM are no longer reachable by default from the Azure web portal GUI. For debugging purposes, the cluster administrator can (in the Azure web portal) open up restricted access to the storage account. The step list below describes how to do this.

1. Navigate to the cluster’s storage account in the Azure web portal.
2. Go to ‘Security + Networking | Networking’. 
3. Change ‘Public network access’ from ‘Disabled’ to ‘Enabled from selected virtual networks and IP addresses’
4. From https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/azure/virtual-machines/linux/serial-console-linux#serial-console-security add to the storage account firewall all IPs listed for the region of the VM, in my case ‘Europe North/Europe West’, to the list of allowed IP addresses. 
5. Save settings. 
6. Retry serial console connection for the VM from the Azure web portal GUI. 
7. To also get to the boot diagnostics logs, you can additionally check the checkbox for adding your client IP to the list of allowed IPs.