Azure Monitor

Monitoring

Monitoring is an essential aspect of cloud computing, as it helps evaluate and manage cloud-based services, applications, and infrastructure. There are various monitoring tools for cloud-based applications, and they are not restricted only to the monitoring of servers hosted on Azure. Organizations pay much attention to other cloud-based services they consume – such as Office365, Salesforce, and Azure App Services, amongst others.

While most of these tools can be monitored with the help of traditional tools, cloud monitoring comes into the picture because it offers unique features over its conventional counterparts. Cloud monitoring works through tools that supervise the servers, resources, and applications. The sources of these tools are:

In-house Tools – These tools are from the cloud service provider and are a preferred and simple option because the tools are already part of the service. As there is no installation, integrating these in-house monitoring tools is seamless and less time-consuming.

Independent Tools – The SaaS provider may differ from the cloud service provider. The SaaS providers have expertise in cloud monitoring tools.

Cloud monitoring tools can detect problems that hinder the seamless workflow of an organization. These tools detect anything that prevents a business from delivering services to clients. On an overall basis, the monitoring tools offer data on security, the performance of the infrastructure, and customer behavior.

This is possible because the prime focus of cloud monitoring is keeping networks safe from cyber attacks. IT teams of organizations can use the tools effectively to detect breaches and vulnerabilities in the system and fix them before any further damage. With the help of monitoring tools, damage mitigation becomes easy, thus boosting performance. This, in turn, enhances functionality, which improves the quality of services you offer. Speed metrics, such as user experience and functionalities too, can be monitored. The resultant data is useful for organizations to optimize websites and applications.

Azure Monitor

Like many other organizations, Azure has its monitoring tools under the umbrella term Azure Monitor. Azure Monitor is a powerful reporting and analytics tool, which helps maximize the performance of your applications. It delivers an inclusive solution for collecting and analyzing the user's cloud and on-premise environments. The best part about the monitoring tools under Azure Monitor is that it gives you a clear view of how your applications are performing. Along with this, it also proactively identifies issues affecting these applications and the resources linked to them. Once you know the root cause of a problem, it is easy for you to resolve it.

Azure Monitor receives data from target resources such as operating systems, applications, Azure resources, and Azure subscriptions. The nature of these resources helps identify the data type, which can either be a metric, a log, or both. Azure Monitor then processes this collected data.

Cloud systems feature many channels that produce data at any given moment. These systems are volatile, and because even a small Azure environment can produce a vast volume of data, monitoring can get complicated. With Azure Monitor, you get simplified solutions that help you monitor and manage your systems effectively.

What Can You Monitor?

Insights and core solutions are part of Azure Monitor, as they meet Azure's support and service level agreements. Insights provide a personalized monitoring experience for specific services and applications. Insights gather both logs and metrics and analyze them. The tools compile and review only logs, not metrics, when it comes to core solutions.

Align with this, Azure Services, too, can be monitored by Azure Monitor. Azure Services include Azure Active Directory, Event Hubs, Event Grids, Function Apps, Logic Apps, etc. The parameters enabled for Azure Services to monitor are metrics, logs, and insights. Virtual machine agents, too, receive data from guest operating systems and send data to the monitor. Apart from this, product integrations and other solutions, too, are eligible to be monitored by Azure Monitor.

Why Azure Monitor?

Azure Monitor features monitoring tools that play an important role in tracking and analyzing data of all companies – irrespective of the scale. It is a crucial component of any organization's infrastructure, as it is essential to keep an eye on different components of a business application. Only then can you understand whether these components are functioning as they should or not. Azure Monitor also helps detect and rectify errors at the right time, ensuring the organization functions smoothly.

Native Azure Monitoring Tools

Azure Monitor features native monitoring tools to ensure that your integrations are monitored on the go. These tools are Azure Activity Logs, Azure Log Analytics Workspace, Azure Alerts, Azure Diagnostics, Azure Metrics, Axure Service Health, Azure Advisor, and Azure Application Insights. Each of these tools helps improve the cost-effectiveness, performance, reliability, and security of all your Azure resources. While the functionality of each tool is different, the ultimate goal is to detect anomalies in the system, rectify them and improve performance and usability.

Third-Party Azure Monitoring Tools

Native tools are not flexible and do not offer customized monitoring or application-level consolidated monitoring. In such scenarios, Azure third-party monitoring tools come into the picture. Some of the third-party monitoring tools are – Severless360, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, NewRelic, and Datadog. Like the native monitoring tools, each of these tools, too, offers different functions. With these tools, application-based monitoring becomes a lot easier. These tools help understand the health of the system at prescribed time intervals. In case of any discrepancies, the tools instantly notify, making it easy to rectify the issue before it affects the entire workflow.