Breaking Down Monitoring in Azure

So let’s talk monitoring in Azure, and honestly this is a topic that makes most people start to become a “deer in headlights”. And the reason is that most executives love to say “We need to have a great monitoring story” but monitoring is a massive topic and most don’t know where to begin.

And the truth is that it is a huge and multi-faceted topic that have a variety of solutions that can be applied in a variety of ways. So I wanted to gather some resources to help give you if your trying to figure out which way is up.

MSLearn: Provides guided learning through articles, hands on labs and videos on a variety of topics. Some of the key ones I thought would be of interest given your ask are:

• Introduction to Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• Design for efficiency and operations in Azure
• Introduction to Azure Government
• Administer Infrastructure resources in Azure
• Predict Costs and optimize spending for Azure
• Securing your Azure Resources with Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
• Intro to Security on Azure

When it comes to monitoring we have several products and services that are at the core of providing that support:

• Azure Monitor: provides a sophisticated tools for collecting an analyzing telemetry data and providing the ability to gather metrics, generate alerts, and build custom dashboards to monitor your environment.
  • What is Azure Monitor?
  • Quick Start – Monitoring Java Applications
  • Quick Start – Collect Data on Azure VMs
  • Quick Start – Collect Data on Linux VMs
  • Tutorial – Analyze Data with Log Analytics
  • Tutorial – Alerts based on Azure Monitor
  • Continuous Monitoring with Azure Monitor
• Azure Network Watcher: Allows for monitoring, diagnosing, and viewing metrics on your azure virtual network.
  • Tutorial – Monitor network communication between two VMs
  • How to – Configure Network Watcher
• Log Analytics: this is the backend that drives many of the other services, including providing support for ingestion of custom logs to monitor solutions.
• Application Insights: This provides robust monitoring of the application code including the events, requests, performance and responses. It makes it easier to see at an application functionality level how users are using your applications and how you can identify problems or areas for improvement.
• Overview for DevOps
• Security Center: Uses log analytics to monitor your solution for potential security risks.
  • Quick Start : Onboard your Azure Subscription to Security Center Standard
  • Quick Start: Onboard your Linux VMs to Security Center
  • Tutorial – Protect resources with Security Center
  • Tutorial – Respond to Security Incident
  • Using Security Center for Incident Response
• Azure Activity Log: This keeps track of all actions performed on a subscription to insure insight into the subscription level events.

Additionally we have videos at a site called Channel 9 on a variety of topics

• Network Performance Monitor:
  • Network Performance Monitor Overview [6:05]
  • Network Performance Monitor Deep Dive [30:19]
• Azure Monitor
  • Azure Fridays – Azure Monitor[13:14]
  • Getting started with Azure Monitor[5:12]
  • Azure Monitor Activity Alerts[3:41]
  • Red Shirt Dev Tour – Azure Monitor[6:29]
• Azure Log Analytics
  • Azure Fridays – Azure Log Analytics[13:02]
  • What’s changed with Log Analytics[5:08]
  • The improved Azure Log Analytics: A powerful query language with machine learning and more[1:06:20]
• General Monitoring:
  • Continuous Monitoring for Dev Ops with Azure Application Insights & Log Analytics[1:23:39]
  • Application Monitoring and Feedback Loops

Links for Kusto the Log Analytics Querying Language

Deploying ARM Templates through CLI

Links for Full Monitoring Solution

Links for Logs on Log Analytics and details of data captured