Introduction
Azure Monitor provides a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your cloud and on‑premises environments. It helps you understand the performance of your applications, proactively identify issues, and maintain the health of your workloads.
Key Features
- Metrics – Real‑time performance data collected at 1‑minute granularity (or finer).
- Logs (Log Analytics) – Centralized log storage with a powerful query language (Kusto).
- Alerts – Automated actions based on metric thresholds, log queries, or service health events.
- Dashboards – Custom visualizations and workbooks for operational insights.
- Application Insights – Deep‑diagnostics for application performance management.
Architecture Overview
The diagram above illustrates how Azure Monitor ingests data from Azure resources, on‑premises environments, and custom sources. It then routes data to the appropriate services (Metric Store, Log Analytics Workspace, Application Insights) for storage, analysis, and visualization.
Quick Start
Enable monitoring for a virtual machine in three steps:
- Navigate to the Azure portal and open the VM resource.
- Under Monitoring, click Insights and enable it.
- After a few minutes, view the generated metric charts and logs in the Metrics Explorer.
# Azure CLI example
az vm monitor metrics enable --resource-group MyResourceGroup --name MyVM
az monitor log-analytics workspace create \
--resource-group MyResourceGroup \
--workspace-name MyWorkspace
az monitor log-analytics workspace link \
--resource-group MyResourceGroup \
--workspace-name MyWorkspace \
--resource-id $(az vm show -g MyResourceGroup -n MyVM --query id -o tsv)