Azure Monitoring

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 are performing and proactively identifies issues affecting them.

Key Components

Azure Monitor consists of several integrated components:

Azure Monitor Metrics: Collects and stores numeric values over time, enabling you to track performance and health.
Azure Monitor Logs: Collects and indexes log and performance data for analysis.
Application Insights: A powerful Application Performance Management (APM) service for developers.
Azure Advisor: Provides recommendations to optimize performance, reduce costs, and improve security.
Log Analytics: A tool in the Azure portal to write and run Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries against log data.

Getting Started with Metrics

Azure Monitor Metrics allows you to collect and analyze real-time performance metrics for Azure resources. These metrics are crucial for understanding resource behavior and identifying performance bottlenecks.

Viewing Metrics

To view metrics for a resource:

Navigate to the Azure portal.
Select the resource you want to monitor.
In the resource menu, under the Monitoring section, click on Metrics.

Example of Azure Monitor Metrics interface in the Azure portal.

Creating Metric Alerts

You can create alerts based on metric values to notify you when certain conditions are met. This is a proactive way to manage your resources.

From the Metrics blade, click on New alert rule.
Configure the conditions, actions, and details for your alert.

Tip: For critical resources, consider setting up alerts for metrics like CPU percentage, memory usage, and network in/out.

Leveraging Azure Monitor Logs

Azure Monitor Logs provides a robust querying experience for analyzing log data from various sources, including Azure resources, VMs, and applications.

Log Sources

Common log sources include:

Diagnostic logs from Azure services.
Activity logs for subscription events.
Performance counters from Windows and Linux VMs.
Application logs from Application Insights.

Kusto Query Language (KQL)

KQL is used to query data in Azure Monitor Logs. It's a powerful and expressive language for data exploration and analysis.

Here's a simple example to get the last 100 System Events from the Event Log:


Event
| where TimeGenerated > ago(1h)
| where EventLog == "System"
| take 100
| sort by TimeGenerated desc

Analyzing Log Data

Use Log Analytics in the Azure portal to write and run KQL queries. You can also visualize query results using charts and dashboards.

Note: Familiarize yourself with KQL syntax for effective log analysis. The Azure documentation provides extensive resources for learning KQL.

Application Insights

Application Insights is an APM service that extends the capabilities of Azure Monitor. It helps you monitor the performance, availability, and usage of your live web applications.

Key Features

Automatic performance monitoring.
Detection of application exceptions and failures.
Live metrics stream for real-time monitoring.
Usage analysis and customer telemetry.

Best Practices

Define clear monitoring goals: Understand what you need to monitor and why.
Set up alerts for critical conditions: Don't wait for users to report issues.
Utilize dashboards: Create custom dashboards to visualize key metrics and logs.
Regularly review logs: Proactively identify potential problems.
Implement Application Insights: For deep application performance insights.

Warning: Ensure your diagnostic settings are properly configured to send the necessary logs and metrics to Azure Monitor.

By effectively leveraging Azure Monitor, you can gain deep insights into your cloud resources, ensure high availability, and optimize performance.