Shorticle 654 – Understand resource usage and monitor cloud resources quickly using Azure Resource Graph

When you are working on large estate of applications in an enterprise, your cloud resources will be very high and monitoring and understanding their usage will be a tedious task. To control and manage cloud resources to avoid resource waste and check if resource is in use or not (eg: VM or container instance), you may use a resource monitoring tool like Azure Monitor or AWS CloudWatch. But if we have a comprehensive cloud resource management service to query, explore and analyze cloud resources, we can use the new Azure service called Azure Resource Graph which has Resource analyzer, Query run and Resource graph explorer.

Azure resource graph has a query editor where we can query cloud resources (as shown in below screenshot) and get to know the resources and its usage, location (region, AZ) and environment details through its meta data tagging.

When you run Azure Resource Graph explorer, it picks up all resource types and we can select a particular resource category from the directory to query the cloud resource from that category eg: Kubernetes instance, VM instance, API services and security resources.

We can run one or more query together in Azure resource graph query explorer and get to know the results in a table view. We can use graph view to visualize resources in Map or bar or donut graph to visually understand resource distribution.

From this kind of query and monitoring resources, we can drill down individual resource quickly and pin them in dashboard for quick access to frequently queried resources and explore them further on their usage pattern and environment details to optimize resources easily.

Azure Resource Graph is not replacement for Billing and advisor service or Azure monitor but it compliments them for cloud resource management and resource monitoring and analysis.

For further read: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/features/resource-graph/#features

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