Azure Monitoring Documentation
Introduction to Azure Monitoring
Azure Monitoring provides a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your cloud and on-premises environments. It helps you understand the performance and availability of your applications and resources, detect anomalies, and diagnose issues.
With Azure Monitoring, you can gain deep insights into your system's health, identify bottlenecks, and ensure optimal resource utilization. This documentation guides you through the key services and features available for monitoring your Azure resources.
Key Monitoring Services
Azure offers a suite of integrated services for monitoring. Understanding these services is crucial for building a robust monitoring strategy:
- Azure Monitor: The foundational service, unifying data from various sources to provide a holistic view.
- Log Analytics: A powerful query engine for analyzing log data.
- Application Insights: Application performance management (APM) for live web applications.
- Azure Alerts: Proactive notification when critical conditions are detected.
- Azure Dashboards: Customizable visualizations for presenting monitoring data.
Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor is the primary service for collecting and analyzing telemetry data from your Azure and on-premises environments. It aggregates logs and metrics from a wide range of sources, including:
- Azure resources
- Virtual machines
- Container instances
- Applications
- Operating systems
Data collected by Azure Monitor can be used for various purposes:
- Analyzing performance and usage
- Detecting anomalies and diagnosing problems
- Segmenting the impact of issues
- Correlating data from different sources
- Answering operational questions
Metrics are numerical values collected at regular intervals, providing insights into performance. Logs are event-based data that record operational details.
Log Analytics
Log Analytics is a tool within Azure Monitor used for interactive analysis of log data. It allows you to run queries against your logs using the Kusto Query Language (KQL) to extract valuable information about your applications and infrastructure.
Key capabilities of Log Analytics include:
- Querying logs: Write KQL queries to search and analyze your data.
- Real-time analysis: Monitor live data streams.
- Data correlation: Link events across different resources.
- Reporting and visualization: Export query results and integrate with dashboards.
// Example KQL query to find errors in the last hourAppExceptions| where timestamp > ago(1h)| where severityLevel > 1| summarize count() by type
Application Insights
Application Insights is a powerful Application Performance Management (APM) service that provides rich instrumentation for your live applications. It helps you detect issues, understand how users interact with your app, and identify performance bottlenecks.
Application Insights collects telemetry such as:
- Request rates, response times, and failure rates
- Dependency performance and failure rates
- Server exceptions and response times
- Page view load times and usage patterns
- Client-side exceptions
It supports a wide range of languages and platforms, including .NET, Java, Node.js, Python, and more.
Azure Alerts
Azure Alerts proactively notify you when critical conditions are detected in your subscription. Alerts are based on metrics, logs, or activity logs, and can trigger various actions, such as sending an email, running a webhook, or creating a ticket.
You can configure alert rules to monitor:
- CPU usage exceeding a threshold
- Disk I/O dropping below a minimum
- Specific error messages in logs
- Security events
Alerts help you respond quickly to potential issues before they impact your users.
Dashboards
Azure Dashboards provide a centralized, customizable view of your Azure resources. You can pin charts, metrics, logs, and alerts to a dashboard to get a quick overview of your system's health and performance.
Key features of Azure Dashboards:
- Customizable layout: Arrange tiles as you see fit.
- Real-time data: Dashboards update automatically.
- Shared views: Share dashboards with your team.
- Integration with other services: Visualize data from Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and more.
API References
Explore the APIs available for programmatic access to Azure Monitoring data and management.
Metrics API
The Azure Monitor Metrics API allows you to programmatically retrieve performance metrics for Azure resources. You can fetch time-series data for a wide range of metrics.
| Endpoint | Description | Method |
|---|---|---|
/subscriptions/{subscriptionId}/providers/Microsoft.Insights/metrics |
Retrieve metrics for a given resource or resource group. | GET |
Log Analytics Query API
The Log Analytics Query API enables you to run KQL queries against your Log Analytics workspaces from your applications or scripts.
| Endpoint | Description | Method |
|---|---|---|
/subscriptions/{subscriptionId}/resourcegroups/{resourceGroupName}/providers/Microsoft.OperationalInsights/workspaces/{workspaceName}/query |
Execute a KQL query. | POST |
Alerts Management API
Manage alert rules and retrieve alert history using the Alerts Management API.
| Endpoint | Description | Method |
|---|---|---|
/subscriptions/{subscriptionId}/providers/Microsoft.AlertsManagement/alerts |
List alerts. | GET |
/subscriptions/{subscriptionId}/providers/Microsoft.Insights/alertRules |
Manage alert rules. | GET/POST/PUT/DELETE |
For detailed API specifications, please refer to the official Azure Monitor REST API documentation.