Microsoft Azure – Monitoring

Microsoft Azure provides an overall monitoring solution. Azure Monitoring helps us to track performance, maintain and identify trends. It comes with a GUI tool that is easy and powerful.
It is the platform service that provides a single source for monitoring Azure resources with Azure Monitor, you can visualize, query, route, archive and take action on the metrics and logs coming from resources in Azure. You can also work with this data using the Monitor portal blade, Monitor Powershell, cross-platform CLI, Azure monitor REST APIs.

It not only provides Activity Log and Diagnostic Logs but it also provides useful information on your complete structure such as:

  1. Azure Monitor platform-level metrics
  2. Compute guest OS metrics (eg. perf counters) and logs (eg. IIS, ETW, syslogs)
  3. Custom or application metrics and logs
  4. Storage metrics and logs
  5. Billing data
  6. App Service logs

Here is the list of notifications you can set for your infrastructure:

  1. Azure Monitor metric alerts
  2. Azure Monitor Activity Log alerts
  3. Autoscale notifications
  4. Log Search Query alerts
  5. Application Insights metric alerts
  6. Application Insights web tests

Why do we need this service?

Performance issue in your cloud app can impact your business with multiple interconnected components and frequent releases, degradations can happen at any time. And if you are developing an app, your users may discover an issue that you didn’t find in testing. You should know about these immediately and have tools for diagnosing and fixing the problems. Microsoft Azure has a range of tools for identifying and resolving such problems.

Monitoring Azure environment

There is a range of tools for monitoring the Azure environment, from the application code running on Azure to the services and infrastructure hosting of application. These tools work together to offer comprehensive cloud monitoring and include:

Azure Monitor: It’s a monitoring data pipeline for your Azure environment and offers that data directly into Log Analytics as well as third party tools where we can gain insight into the data and combine it with data from on-premises or other cloud resources.

Application Insights: It provides powerful tools for analyzing the application while developing and operating the application. It deeply integrates with visual studio to enable us to get right to the problem line or lines of code, so we can fix it and offers usage analytics to analyze customer usage to the applications for a product manager as well.

Log Analytics: It provides rich tools to analyze data across sources, allows complex queries across all logs and can proactively alert on specified conditions. we can even collect custom into its central repository so we can query and visualize it.