Manage: Establish cloud visibility with Azure monitoring tools
Learn about the various monitoring services available on the Azure cloud platform. Use these tools for application performance metrics, data analytics and other insights.
IT teams need visibility into their cloud environments to ensure their workloads run properly. Public cloud providers, including Microsoft, offer management and monitoring tools to help users access insights on performance, availability, security and other important metrics.
Microsoft Azure users can choose from a number of native monitoring services. With these tools, IT teams can quickly identify and resolve issues, consistently track resources and evaluate service health. Use this rundown to help ensure the health of your workloads on Microsoft's cloud. Understand the various data types you can track and review the features and capabilities of the Azure monitoring tools.
Different data types
Different monitoring tools may be used to monitor separate components in Azure, which also means different data will be collected depending on what is being monitored. Data can be sorted by classification. For example, Microsoft specifies a difference between metrics and logs. Metrics are numerical values that describe an aspect of a system at a point in time, and logs contain different variations of data that are organized into records with different properties for each set. Collected data will typically be stored so users can analyze them at request. Some examples of the data sets Azure monitoring tools will analyze include:
- Application monitoring data, which typically includes data around the performance and functionality of code.
- Azure resource monitoring data, which will include data around the operation of an Azure resource.
- Azure tenant monitoring data, which gathers data regarding the operation of tenant-level Azure services.
- Azure subscription monitoring data, which collects data pertaining to the operation and management of Azure subscriptions.
- Virtual machine and cloud services data, which captures system data and logging data on VMs.
- Application insight data, which relates to application performance monitoring (APM).
- Azure Active Directory reporting data, which collects information on user sign-in activities and system activity.
- Activity logs, which collects information on operations performed on resources in a subscription.
- Network security logs, which will collect data on traffic flowing through a network.
Other data that may be collected includes guest OS monitoring data, storage analytics, requests, response times and events, cost management, planned maintenance and health advisory data, diagnostic logs, failure diagnostics, container monitoring, VPN connection and resource configurations.
Azure monitoring services
Azure Advisor: Azure Advisor provides users with personalized recommendations to optimize their deployments. First, Advisor scans resource configurations in an enterprise's environments. After that's complete, Advisor provides step-by-step instructions and actions to improve resources for high availability, security, performance and cost. Azure Advisor also pulls recommendations from other Microsoft cloud services -- such as Azure Security Center and Azure Cost Management -- into a centralized dashboard where users can view all suggestions in one place.
By Sarah Neenan. Read more here.