Azure Monitor is a comprehensive monitoring solution for collecting, analyzing, and responding to monitoring data from your cloud and on-premises environments. You can use Azure Monitor to maximize the availability and performance of your applications and services. It helps you understand how your applications are performing and allows you to manually and programmatically respond to system events.
Data Sources:
App – Application performance, health, and activity data.
Workloads – IaaS workloads such as SQL server, Oracle or SAP running on a hosted Virtual Machine.
Container – Data about containers, such as Azure Kubernetes Service, Prometheus, and the applications running inside containers.
Operating system – Data about the guest operating system on which your application is running.
Azure resource – Data about the operation of an Azure resource from inside the resource, including changes. Resource Logs are one example.
Azure subscription – The operation and management of an Azure subscription, and data about the health and operation of Azure itself. The activity log is one example.
Azure tenant – Data about the operation of tenant-level Azure services, such as Microsoft Entra ID.
Data Platform:
- Metrics
- Definition:
Metrics are numerical values representing the health, performance, and behavior of resources in your Azure environment. Examples include CPU usage, memory consumption, network latency, and more. - Collection:
Azure Monitor collects metrics from various Azure services automatically. These metrics are then stored in a time-series database for analysis and visualization. - Visualization:
You can use Azure Monitor to visualize metrics through charts, graphs, and dashboards, enabling you to gain insights into the behavior of your resources over time.
- Logs
- Definition:
Azure Monitor Logs (formerly known as Azure Log Analytics) allows you to collect and analyze log data from different sources, including custom logs and data from Azure services. - Collection:
Logs are collected from various sources, such as Azure resources, operating systems, applications, and custom logs. Log data is stored in a central repository for analysis. - Query Language:
Azure Monitor uses the Kusto Query Language (KQL) for querying and analyzing log data, providing a powerful and flexible way to extract insights from your logs.
- Traces
- Definition:
Application Insights, integrated with Azure Monitor, provides distributed tracing capabilities. Traces help you understand how different components of your application interact and perform. - Collection:
Traces capture end-to-end transactions and trace the flow of requests across various components, including dependencies and external services. - Visualization and Analysis:
Application Insights allows you to visualize and analyze traces to identify performance bottlenecks, errors, and other issues affecting your application’s performance.
- Changes
- Definition:
Azure Monitor can track changes made to resources in your Azure environment. This feature is useful for auditing and understanding configuration changes over time. - Collection:
Changes to resources are recorded and can be queried to view historical data about modifications made to resources. - Use Cases:
This capability is crucial for maintaining security and compliance by tracking who made changes, what changes were made, and when they occurred.
Consumption
The Monitor section of the Azure portal provides a visual interface that gives you access to the data collected for Azure resources and an easy way to access the tools, insights, and visualizations in Azure Monitor.
Insights
- Application Insights:
Application Insights monitors the availability, performance, and usage of your web applications. - Container insights:
Container Insights gives you performance visibility into container workloads that are deployed to managed Kubernetes clusters hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service. - VM Insights:
VM Insights monitors your Azure VMs. It analyzes the performance and health of your Windows and Linux VMs and identifies their different processes and interconnected dependencies on external processes. - Network Insights:
Network Insights provides a comprehensive and visual representation through topologies, of health and metrics for all deployed network resources, without requiring any configuration.
Visualize
- Dashboards:
Azure dashboards allow you to combine different kinds of data into a single pane in the Azure portal. You can optionally share the dashboard with other Azure users.
- Workbooks:
Workbooks provide a flexible canvas for data analysis and the creation of rich visual reports in the Azure portal. You can use them to query data from multiple data sources.
- Power BI:
Power BI is a business analytics service that provides interactive visualizations across various data sources. It’s an effective means of making data available to others within and outside your organization.
- Grafana:
Grafana is an open platform that excels in operational dashboards. All versions of Grafana include the Azure Monitor data source plug-in to visualize your Azure Monitor metrics and logs.
Analyze
- Metrics Explorer:
Use the Azure Monitor metrics explorer user interface in the Azure portal to investigate the health and utilization of your resources. Metrics explorer helps you plot charts, visually correlate trends, and investigate spikes and dips in metric values.
- Log Analytics:
The Log Analytics user interface in the Azure portal helps you query the log data collected by Azure Monitor so that you can quickly retrieve, consolidate, and analyze collected data.
- Change Analysis:
Change Analysis is a subscription-level Azure resource provider that checks resource changes in the subscription and provides data for diagnostic tools to help users understand what changes might have caused issues.
Respond
- Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps):
Can improve service quality and reliability by using machine learning to process and automatically act on data you collect from applications, services, and IT resources into Azure Monitor.
- Azure Monitor Alerts:
Notify you of critical conditions and can take corrective action. Alert rules can be based on metric or log data. Metric alert rules provide near-real-time alerts based on collected metrics. Log alerts rules based on logs allow for complex logic across data from multiple sources.
- Auto-scale:
Allows you to dynamically control the number of resources running to handle the load on your application. You can create rules that use Azure Monitor metrics to determine when to automatically add resources when the load increases or remove resources that are sitting idle.
Multicloud Monitoring
In addition to monitoring services and applications in Azure, Azure Monitor can provide complete monitoring for your resources and applications running in other clouds including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Virtual Machines
VM insights in Azure Monitor uses Azure Arc-enabled servers to provide a consistent experience between both Azure virtual machines and your AWS EC2 or GCP VM instances. You can view your hybrid machines right alongside your Azure machines and onboard them using identical methods.
Kubernetes
Container insights in Azure Monitor uses Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes to provide a consistent experience between both Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Kubernetes clusters in your AWS EKS or GCP GKE instances. You can view your hybrid clusters right alongside your Azure machines and onboard them using identical methods.
Applications
Applications hosted outside of Azure must be hard coded to send telemetry to Azure Monitor Application Insights using SDKs for supported languages. Annual code maintenance should be planned to upgrade the SDKs per Application Insights SDK support guidance.
Audit
In addition to monitoring the health of your cloud resources, you can consolidate auditing data from your AWS and GCP clouds into your Log Analytics workspace so that you can consolidate your analysis and reporting.
