Optimize your Azure Monitoring

Companies often spend more than 5 to 10% of their Azure cloud bill on monitoring the cloud services they use. Collecting telemetry and log data is always good to maximize the availability as well as performance of your applications. However this should be enabled wisely and checked regularly, else it may impact negatively on your organization's financial efficiency.

There are 350+ Azure Monitor data sources that can be enabled for observability, allowing you to log basically every step of every service that you use. Sometimes the amount of data being logged exceeds the actual workload, and overshoots the cloud bills as well as the utility. With CloudXcellence, we keep a track of the volumes of data being logged. With features such as "top 10 hotspots", we help you reduce the size and cost of monitoring logs, quickly and efficiently where applicable.

Some examples of scenarios that generate a lot of data:

1) Full (SQL) Database Auditing

Azure SQL Audit traces are typically written to Log Analytics workspaces. Auditing a database may cause a serious pile of data, since every (update/delete/insert/select) query to a database needs to be persisted as an AzureDiagnostics event. An alternative option here would be to persist the audit logging into a Storage account or an Event Hub.

Tip: When possible, disabling just the Insert activity may save hundreds of Gigabytes of logging in case of OLTP workloads. The PowerShell command to disable just the logging of insert statements would look something like this:

Set-AzSqlServerAudit -ResourceGroupName ".." -ServerName "…" -database name "…”? -PredicateExpression "statement not like 'INSERT INTO%'" ?        

2) Azure IaaS agent extensions

Many Virtual Machines have been lift & shift migrated to Azure. The Azure agents to support the migration, may have never been updated since the move, a couple of years ago. Some of these old agents may easily generate a Terabyte of data each month.

Tip: Review the versions you have in use and enable Auto Update of your Azure agents to prevent this from happening to you.

CloudXcellence

If you need an extra pair of eyes to help optimize or look after your Microsoft Azure cloud usage, or just a periodic checkup, please contact us at [email protected]. With Code CX2023 you will receive a 20.23% discount on your annual subscription!