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 are performing and proactively identifies issues affecting them.

By leveraging Azure Monitor, you can visualize performance, diagnose anomalies, and trigger alerts for critical events. It supports a wide range of Azure services, custom applications, and even resources outside of Azure.

Key Capabilities

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Performance Monitoring

Track key metrics, identify bottlenecks, and ensure optimal performance of your applications and infrastructure.

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Alerting

Configure intelligent alerts based on metrics, logs, or activity logs to notify you of critical conditions.

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Log Analytics

Query and analyze logs from various sources using a powerful query language for deep troubleshooting.

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Visualization

Create custom dashboards and workbooks to visualize your data in meaningful ways.

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Application Insights

Gain deep insights into your application's usage, performance, and failures with Application Insights.

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Infrastructure Monitoring

Monitor the health and performance of your virtual machines, containers, and other Azure infrastructure components.

Core Components

Azure Monitor is built around several key components that work together to provide a holistic view of your environment:

  • Metrics: Time-series numerical data representing the health and performance of your resources.
  • Logs: Structured or unstructured data emitted by resources for diagnostics and analysis.
  • Application Insights: An extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for custom applications.
  • Azure Monitor Logs: Collects and organizes log data from various sources for analysis.
  • Workbooks: Interactive reports that combine text, metrics, logs, and other visualizations.
  • Alerts: Rules that monitor metrics or logs and trigger actions when thresholds are met.

Data Collection

Azure Monitor collects telemetry data from a variety of sources, including:

  • Azure Resources: Platform metrics and activity logs from Azure services.
  • Guest Operating Systems: Performance counters and event logs from virtual machines.
  • Custom Applications: Application-specific telemetry like requests, dependencies, and exceptions.
  • Azure Subscription: Activity logs for subscription-level events.

This data can be sent to either the Metrics store or the Log Analytics workspace, depending on its type and intended use.

Analysis and Action

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

Analyzing Data

  • Metrics Explorer: Visualize metric data in real-time and over time.
  • Log Analytics: Use Kusto Query Language (KQL) to query and analyze log data.

Taking Action

  • Alert Rules: Define conditions and actions (e.g., email, webhook) for proactive notification.
  • Autoscale: Automatically adjust the number of compute resources based on performance metrics.
  • Dashboards and Workbooks: Create custom views to monitor specific aspects of your environment.

For example, you can set up an alert to notify you if the CPU utilization of a virtual machine exceeds 80% for 10 minutes:


// Example alert rule criteria (conceptual)
ON AzureVm.CPUUtilization
WHERE Average > 80% FOR 10 minutes
THEN SendEmail("admin@example.com")

Integration with Other Services

Azure Monitor seamlessly integrates with other Azure services and third-party tools:

  • Azure Advisor: Provides recommendations for optimizing your Azure resources, often leveraging monitoring data.
  • Azure Security Center: Uses monitoring data to detect and respond to threats.
  • Azure DevOps: Integrate monitoring insights into your CI/CD pipelines.
  • Third-Party Tools: Export data or use connectors to integrate with tools like Splunk, Datadog, and Grafana.