How to Do Azure Monitoring the Right Way

Azure Monitor is a powerful tool for monitoring and managing Azure resources and workloads. While often compared to basic monitoring tools, it has far more advanced analytics and automation capabilities. Here’s a guide to using Azure Monitor effectively.

Azure Monitor’s Capabilities Beyond Event Monitoring

Azure Monitor extends its capabilities beyond traditional event monitoring, as discussed in this Azure on Air podcast episode by Vladimir Stefanović hosted by Lex Hegt.

This tool operates on two crucial streams—metrics and logs. Metrics offer real-time insights into system performance, while logs enable a more comprehensive analysis of the underlying infrastructure. The strength of Azure Monitor lies in its ability to collect and process these metrics and logs, providing users with a versatile platform for dynamic dashboards, detailed analysis, and seamless integration with automation tools for efficient alert management. Despite occasional delays, Azure Monitor proves to be a robust solution for non-immediate response tasks, empowering businesses to optimize their monitoring workflows effectively.

Using Azure Monitor Workbooks for monitoring and analysis

Workbooks in Azure Monitor offer a versatile solution within the log analytics workspace, facilitating powerful queries and analysis. Their distinctive advantage lies in the ability to execute queries across various destinations, enabling the consolidation of data from multiple Log Analytics Workspaces. This proves invaluable when managing diverse subscriptions and resources, especially in scenarios involving numerous cloud services. Workbooks also empower users to manipulate columns and configure visuals, introducing color-coded indicators for quick health assessments. Whether assessing CPU usage, memory metrics, or other parameters, workbooks provide a centralized, visually intuitive platform for comprehensive and efficient analysis beyond mere monitoring.

Azure Monitor features and automation

Azure Monitor’s effectiveness is contingent on your workload’s specific needs. Workbooks stand out for their ability to execute queries across regions and subscriptions, providing a unified approach to data analysis. This cross-subscription capability ensures access to relevant data while respecting access permissions. The use of functions in Analytics enables the creation of reusable functions for complex queries, enhancing ease of investigation and filtering. Azure Monitor transcends traditional monitoring, evolving into a robust analysis tool with potent visualization and response capabilities. Its automation potential, triggered by alerts, is pivotal in a landscape prioritizing efficiency and responsiveness.

Limitations of Azure monitor

Azure Monitor offers robust capabilities for monitoring and analysis, yet it has its pros and cons. The tool excels in complex analysis, visualization, and response automation.

However, its reliability for simple alerting may be impacted by occasional delays and outages in data retrieval, making it less suitable for scenarios where real-time alerting is critical. Workloads vary, and Azure Monitor’s effectiveness depends on specific needs.

When addressing potential gaps in the Azure Monitor, a strategic approach involves combining multiple monitoring solutions to ensure a comprehensive alerting and response system. Despite its limitations, Azure Monitor remains a valuable tool when coupled with other monitoring solutions like Serverless360, providing a comprehensive approach to alerting and response.

With the native monitoring tools offered by Azure, it is not possible to get customized monitoring or application-level consolidated monitoring. To address such issues, we have some third-party Azure monitoring tools in the market to complement the loopholes in Azure Monitor.

In this context, Serverless360 emerges as a valuable solution, proving its worth in overcoming the limitations associated with Azure Monitor. To know more, read the comparison between Serverless360 and Azure Monitor.