Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor is a comprehensive monitoring solution for collecting, analyzing, and responding to monitoring data from your cloud and on-premises environments. You can use Azure Monitor to maximize the availability and performance of your applications and services. It helps you understand how your applications are performing and allows you to manually and programmatically respond to system events.

Azure Monitor collects and aggregates the data from every layer and component of your system across multiple Azure and non-Azure subscriptions and tenants. It stores it in a common data platform for consumption by a common set of tools that can correlate, analyze, visualize, and/or respond to the data. You can also integrate other Microsoft and non-Microsoft tools.

High level architecture

Azure Monitor can monitor these types of resources in Azure, other clouds, or on-premises:

• Applications
• Virtual machines
• Guest operating systems
• Containers including Prometheus metrics
• Databases
• Security events in combination with Azure Sentinel
• Networking events and health in combination with Network Watcher
• Custom sources that use the APIs to get data into Azure Monitor

You can also export monitoring data from Azure Monitor into other systems so you can:

• Integrate with other third-party and open-source monitoring and visualization tools
• Integrate with ticketing and other ITSM systems

Azure monitoring tools

Microsoft provides several native monitoring services, each with a specific purpose.

Azure Monitor. Collects and analyzes performance metrics as well as diagnostic and activity logs from cloud environments to determine application availability and performance. Azure Monitor can also provide insight into the operation of applications, containers and VMs running in the cloud.

Azure Advisor. Scans resource configurations and then provides recommendations to improve resources for high availability, security, performance and cost -- so users can optimize their deployments.

Azure Automation. Admins and developers can use this tool to automate cloud management tasks using Azure runbooks. It will monitor for issues or unwanted changes in applications or configurations. Azure Automation can also monitor and ensure updates for Windows and Linux workloads on Azure.

Microsoft Cost Management and Billing. Monitors a user's cloud spending. This tool will break down the costs of specific Azure services and resources.

Azure Service Health. Monitors active service issues and health advisories. Azure users can use this tool to monitor the status of events in their cloud environment and to plan for maintenance.

Azure Network Watcher. Provides insights and metrics on Azure Virtual Networks (VNet), VMs and application gateways. Users can identify network issues, enable or disable resource logs in an Azure VNet and view network metrics.

Azure Resource Health. Allows users to diagnose and receive support for service problems in Azure, specifically relating to its use of resources. Azure Resource Health also monitors the current and past health of an organization's resources.

Third-party Azure monitoring tools

Many other organizations have also made cloud monitoring tools that work with Azure. Some of these tools include:

AppDynamics. This tool is an APM suite of software tools that provides a comprehensive monitoring of enterprise applications, from the end user to back-end database. Azure users can utilize AppDynamics to troubleshoot performance bottlenecks as well as optimize application performance. The tools can also monitor many Azure services such as Azure Cloud Services, Microsoft Azure Queue, Microsoft Azure Remote Services, VMs and data storage.

Datadog. Datadog is a monitoring and analytics tool that can be used to determine performance metrics as well as event monitoring for infrastructure and cloud services. The software can monitor services such as servers, databases and applications. Datadog is particularly useful in Devops teams, for monitoring data throughout the Azure ecosystem.

Dynatrace. This open, AI and ML powered platform that monitors the health of your Azure environment. Users can customize dashboards to review the analyzed data. Dynatrace offers advanced observability, business analytics, automation, application security and more.

Logic Monitor. This software-as-a-service based (SaaS) automated monitoring tool focuses on infrastructure and application performance of cloud-based services. Azure users can monitor the performance of Azure on premises and on hybrid cloud resources.

Serverless360. Serverless360 can monitor serverless services such as Azure Functions, Logic Apps, Event Grids, Event Hubs and Storage queues.

Other third-party Azure Monitoring tools include Sumo Logic, SolarWinds, Ops Genie, New Relic and LogRhythm.