Azure Monitor Overview
Azure Monitor is a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your cloud and on-premises environments. It helps you understand how your applications and services are performing and proactively identifies issues affecting them.
With Azure Monitor, you can collect virtually any metric or log data from any layer of your stack, from applications to the underlying infrastructure. This data is then visualized and analyzed to provide insights into performance, availability, and usage.
Getting Started with Azure Monitor
To begin using Azure Monitor, ensure you have an Azure subscription. You can start by enabling diagnostics settings on your Azure resources to send metrics and logs to a Log Analytics workspace or an Event Hubs namespace.
The primary tools within Azure Monitor are:
- Metrics: Numerical values that describe some aspect of a system at a particular point in time.
- Logs: Event data, performance data, or other types of data that can be aggregated and analyzed.
Key Features
Metrics
Azure Monitor collects a wide range of metrics for your Azure resources. These metrics are time-series data that can be visualized in charts, used to trigger alerts, and analyzed for trends. You can view metrics for compute, storage, networking, and many other service categories.
Get-AzMetric -ResourceName "my-vm" -ResourceGroup "my-rg" -MetricName "Percentage CPU"Logs
Logs provide rich, detailed information about events occurring within your applications and infrastructure. Azure Monitor collects logs from various sources, including Azure resources, virtual machines, and custom applications.
The Kusto Query Language (KQL) is used to query and analyze log data stored in Log Analytics workspaces. This allows for powerful diagnostic and analytical capabilities.
Alerts
Azure Monitor alerts notify you when significant conditions are detected in your monitoring data. You can create alert rules based on metrics, log queries, or activity logs. Alerts can trigger automated actions, such as sending emails, running webhooks, or initiating Azure Functions.
Application Insights
Application Insights is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for web developers. Use it to monitor live applications, automatically detect anomalies, and diagnose issues with minimal instrumentation. It supports a wide range of languages and platforms.
Log Analytics
Log Analytics is a tool in Azure Monitor that provides a powerful query language (KQL) for analyzing log data. It's used to store and process log data from various sources, enabling deep insights into your system's behavior and performance.
Heartbeat
| where TimeGenerated > ago(1h)
| count
Integrations
Azure Monitor integrates seamlessly with other Azure services, including Azure DevOps, Azure Security Center, and Azure Automation. It also supports integration with third-party tools and services through APIs and data export capabilities.
Best Practices
- Define clear monitoring objectives before implementation.
- Centralize log data in Log Analytics workspaces.
- Configure meaningful alert rules with appropriate thresholds.
- Regularly review dashboards and reports for insights.
- Automate responses to common alerts where possible.
Tutorials
Explore our step-by-step tutorials to learn how to configure and use various Azure Monitor features: