Azure Monitoring Documentation

Gain insights into your Azure resources and applications.

Table of Contents

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 infrastructure, identify issues, and respond to them promptly.

Azure Monitor: The Core Service

Azure Monitor is the central hub for all monitoring data in Azure. It unifies and extends existing Azure services like Azure Operational Insights and Application Insights into a single, comprehensive platform. Azure Monitor collects and analyzes telemetry data from virtually all Azure resources and can also ingest data from external sources.

Key Features and Capabilities

Metrics

Metrics are numerical values that describe some aspect of a system at a particular point in time. They are lightweight and can support near real-time scenarios. Azure Monitor collects metrics from your Azure resources, allowing you to track performance indicators such as CPU usage, network traffic, and request rates.

Example: Monitoring the average CPU percentage of a Virtual Machine.

# Example Kusto Query (KQL) for metrics (conceptual)
SELECT
    TIMESTAMP,
    AVERAGE(CPUPercentage) AS AvgCPU
FROM
    AzureMetrics
WHERE
    RESOURCEGROUP = 'MyResourceGroup' AND RESOURCE_NAME = 'MyVM'
GROUP BY
    BIN(TIMESTAMP, 5min)
ORDER BY
    TIMESTAMP

Logs

Log data contains different kinds of information including events, traces, and errors. Log data can be structured, semi-structured, or unstructured text. Azure Monitor collects log data from various sources and stores it in a Log Analytics workspace, where you can query it using Kusto Query Language (KQL).

Example: Analyzing application error logs.

// Example Kusto Query (KQL) for logs
AppExceptions
| where TIMESTAMP > ago(1h)
| summarize count() by ExceptionType, bin(TIMESTAMP, 5m)
| order by TIMESTAMP asc

Alerts

Alerts notify you of critical conditions or significant events that require your attention. You can configure alert rules that trigger actions, such as sending an email, triggering a webhook, or running an Azure Automation runbook, when specific conditions are met in your metrics or logs.

Note: Setting up effective alerts is crucial for proactive issue resolution. Ensure your alert rules are specific and actionable.

Dashboards

Azure Dashboards provide a customizable view of your monitoring data. You can pin charts, metrics, and log query results to a dashboard to create a centralized overview of your critical resources and their health.

Workbooks

Azure Workbooks combine text, metrics, and logs into rich interactive reports. They allow you to explore and analyze your data in more depth, create visualizations, and share insights with your team. Workbooks are highly flexible and can be used for a wide range of scenarios, from operational analysis to capacity planning.

Collecting Data

Azure Monitor supports a variety of data sources:

Azure Resource Logs

Resource logs are logs emitted by Azure resources. They provide detailed information about the operation of the resource itself. You can send resource logs to Log Analytics for analysis or to Azure Storage for archiving.

Azure Activity Log

The Activity Log provides insights into subscription-level events that occurred in Azure. It tracks events such as resource creation, modification, or deletion. The Activity Log is automatically enabled for all Azure subscriptions.

Application Insights

Application Insights is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for developers and DevOps professionals. Use it to monitor your live applications. It automatically detects performance anomalies and includes powerful analytics tools to help you diagnose issues and understand what users do with your app.

Log Analytics

Log Analytics is a tool in Azure Monitor that analyzes log query results and enables you to interactively explore log data. It helps you find errors, track performance, and discover trends in your logs.

Analyzing Data

Once data is collected, Azure Monitor provides powerful tools for analysis:

  • Log Analytics: Use Kusto Query Language (KQL) to perform complex queries on your log data.
  • Metrics Explorer: Visualize and analyze metric data over time.
  • Workbooks: Create interactive reports and visualizations for deeper insights.

Taking Action

Azure Monitor allows you to automate responses to detected issues:

  • Alert Rules: Define conditions that trigger actions.
  • Action Groups: Specify the actions to be taken when an alert fires (e.g., email, SMS, webhook, Azure Function).
  • Autoscale: Automatically adjust the number of compute resources based on performance metrics.

Best Practices

Tip: Implement a consistent tagging strategy for your Azure resources to simplify filtering and analysis in Azure Monitor.
  • Define clear monitoring objectives for your applications and infrastructure.
  • Configure alert rules to be specific and actionable, minimizing noise.
  • Regularly review your monitoring dashboards and workbooks to stay informed.
  • Utilize Log Analytics for deep dives into log data to troubleshoot issues.
  • Consider using Azure Policy to enforce monitoring configurations across your subscriptions.
Warning: Ensure appropriate access controls are in place for your monitoring data and configurations to maintain security and privacy.