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 the resources they depend on.
Key benefits of Azure Monitoring include:
- Proactive issue detection: Identify problems before they impact your users.
- Performance optimization: Understand resource utilization and identify bottlenecks.
- Security insights: Detect anomalies and security threats.
- Cost management: Monitor resource usage for cost optimization.
Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor is the foundational monitoring service in Azure. It collects and analyzes telemetry data from a wide range of sources, providing a unified view of your Azure resources.
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 platform metrics for Azure services and can also collect custom metrics from your applications and resources.
You can use metrics to:
- Track performance indicators like CPU utilization, network traffic, and request rates.
- Identify trends and anomalies over time.
- Trigger alerts based on metric thresholds.
Example of a common metric:
CPU Usage (%)Logs
Log data provides detailed diagnostic information about resource behavior. Azure Monitor collects log data from various sources, including Azure resources, operating systems, and applications.
Log data is typically stored in a Log Analytics workspace and can be queried using Kusto Query Language (KQL).
You can use logs to:
- Troubleshoot issues by examining detailed event information.
- Analyze application behavior and user activity.
- Perform security audits and forensic analysis.
Example KQL query snippet:
AzureActivity | where ResourceProvider == "MICROSOFT.COMPUTE" and OperationName == "DELETE"Alerts
Alerts notify you when specific conditions are met in your monitoring data. They are crucial for proactive response to potential issues.
Alert rules can be configured based on metrics, log queries, or activity logs.
Dashboards
Dashboards provide a consolidated view of your most important monitoring data. You can create custom dashboards in the Azure portal to visualize metrics, logs, and charts from different resources in one place.
Dashboards are highly customizable and can be shared with your team.
Application Insights
Application Insights is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for developers and DevOps professionals. It is used to monitor your live applications. It can automatically detect performance anomalies and includes powerful analytics tools to help you diagnose issues and understand what users do with your app.
Key features include:
- Performance monitoring
- Availability testing
- End-to-end transaction tracing
- Usage analysis
- Failure diagnostics
Log Analytics
Log Analytics is a tool in Azure Monitor that is used to edit and run Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries on log data without leaving the Azure portal.
It allows you to query data, analyze trends, and investigate events across your Azure resources and on-premises systems.
Azure Advisor
Azure Advisor is a service that provides personalized recommendations to help you optimize your Azure resources for performance, security, cost, reliability, and operational excellence.
Advisor analyzes the configuration and telemetry of your deployed Azure resources and suggests actions that can help improve various aspects of your cloud deployment.
Action Groups
Action groups are a collection of notification preferences and actions that are triggered by an alert. They allow you to define what happens when an alert fires, such as sending an email, SMS, triggering a webhook, or starting an automation runbook.
Action groups centralize and reuse alert actions, simplifying alert management.
Azure Resource Health
Azure Resource Health provides information about the current and past health of your Azure services and virtual machines. It helps you diagnose and resolve issues by providing a clear status of your resources.
Resource Health is your primary resource for understanding the impact of Azure service issues on your resources.