Microsoft Azure Monitor
There are a range of tools for monitoring your Azure environment, from the application code running on Azure to the services and infrastructure hosting your application. These tools work together to offer comprehensive cloud monitoring and include:
- Azure Monitor – the Azure service that operates as a consolidated pipeline for all monitoring data from Azure services. It gives you access to performance metrics and events that describe the operation of the Azure infrastructure and any Azure services you are using. Azure Monitor is a monitoring data pipeline for your Azure environment, and offers that data directly into Log Analytics as well as 3rd party tools where you can gain insight into that data and combine it with data from on premises or other cloud resources.
- Application Insights – the Azure service that offers application performance monitoring and user analytics. It monitors the code you’ve written and applications you’ve deployed on Azure, on-premises, or other clouds. By instrumenting your application with the Application Insights SDK you can get access to a range of data including response times of dependencies, exception traces, debugging snapshots, and execution profiles. It provides powerful tools for analyzing this application telemetry while developing and operating your application. It deeply integrates with Visual Studio to enable you to get right to the problem line(s) of code so you can fix it, and offers usage analytics to analyze customer usage of your applications for product managers as well.
Overview of Application Insights for DevOps
- Log Analytics – is an Azure service that ingests log and metric data from Azure services (via Azure Monitor), Azure VMs, and on-premises or other cloud infrastructure and offers flexible log search and out-of-the box analytics on top of this data. It provides rich tools to analyze data across sources, allows complex queries across all logs, and can proactively alert on specified conditions. You can even collect custom data into its central repository so you can query and visualize it. You can also take advantage of Log Analytic’s built-in solutions to immediately gain insights into the security and functionality of your infrastructure.
Azure Monitor enables you to consume telemetry to gain visibility into the performance and health of your workloads on Azure. The most important type of Azure telemetry data is the metrics (also called performance counters) emitted by most Azure resources. Azure Monitor provides several ways to configure and consume these metrics for monitoring and troubleshooting.
Telemetry data is important
Because telemetry data is sending every minute, you get near to real-time monitoring of your data and/or your IT Solution.
Alerts on Azure Monitor data
Azure Monitor provides several ways to interact with metrics, including charting them in the portal, accessing them through the REST API, or querying them using PowerShell or CLI. Here you find a complete list of all metrics currently available with Azure Monitor’s metric pipeline.
There are three types of alerts off of data available from Azure Monitor — metric alerts, near real-time metric alerts (preview) and Activity Log alerts.
- Metric alerts – This alert triggers when the value of a specified metric crosses a threshold that you assign. The alert generates a notification when the alert is “Activated” (when the threshold is crossed and the alert condition is met) as well as when it is “Resolved” (when the threshold is crossed again and the condition is no longer met)
- Near real-time metric alerts (preview) – These alerts are similar to metric alerts but differ in a few ways. Firstly, as the name suggests these alerts can trigger in near real-time (as fast as 1 min). They also support monitoring multiple(currently two) metrics. The alert generates a notification when the alert is “Activated” (when the thresholds for each metric are crossed at the same time and the alert condition is met) as well as when it is “Resolved” (when at least one metric crosses the threshold again and the condition is no longer met).
- Activity log alerts – A streaming log alert that triggers when an Activity Log event is generated that matches filter criteria that you have assigned. These alerts have only one state, “Activated,” since the alert engine simply applies the filter criteria to any new event. These alerts can be used to become notified when a new Service Health incident occurs or when a user or application performs an operation in your subscription, for example, “Delete virtual machine.”
Alerts overview
When you go to the Microsoft Azure Portal and click on the left side on Monitor you can start your Solutions and configure them.
To Gain visibility and control across your hybrid cloud with simplified security and operations management there is Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS)
Here you find a lot of Hybrid Solutions to monitor and find the benefits of Cloud management with Log Analytics.
Understanding alerts in Log Analytics :
Alerts are created by alert rules that automatically run log searches at regular intervals. If the results of the log search match particular criteria then an alert record is created. The rule can then automatically run one or more actions to proactively notify you of the alert or invoke another process. Different types of alert rules use different logic to perform this analysis.
In addition to creating an alert record in the Log Analytics repository, alerts can take the following actions.
- Email. Send an email to proactively notify you of a detected issue.
- Runbook. An alert in Log Analytics can start a runbook in Azure Automation. This is typically done to attempt to correct the detected issue. The runbook can be started in the cloud in the case of an issue in Azure or another cloud, or it could be started on a local agent for an issue on a physical or virtual machine.
- Webhook. An alert can start a webhook and pass it data from the results of the log search. This allows integration with external services such as an alternate alerting system, or it may attempt to take corrective action for an external web site.
Here you find more on Understanding alerts in Log Analytics
To keep you in Control of monitoring, Microsoft made two Mobile Apps :
Microsoft Operations Management Suite Mobile App
Microsoft OMS on my Phone
And you got the Microsoft Azure Mobile App
For Microsoft Azure Monitoring there are all kind of Solutions in the Marketplace available :
Conclusion :
Monitoring your IT Solutions is really important for your Application Life Cycle management to get feedback for improvements and to get Customer satisfaction.
With Microsoft Monitoring from the Cloud with Azure and OMS you get more inside information via telemetry and log analytics to keep you Up-To-Date of
your IT Hybrid Infrastructure. Modern Hybrid Cloud Datacenter(s) need a Modern Secure Monitoring environment to keep yourself and your business in Control all the time in this rapidly fast changing IT World.
Monitoring via the Microsoft Cloud gives you :
- More Security information, Alerts and Advice to prevent security leaks
- Application improvements in your Life Cycle management
- Automation of action plans on Events.
- The Health of your IT Hybrid Cloud Services
- Makes troubleshooting much easier with Diagnostics logs
- Integration with on-premises IT Infrastructures
- OMS assessments, like Active Directory, SQL, Upgrades, Malware, Security & Audits………… and More
- Great Dashboards for DevOps, IT Administrators, IT Managers, or for your Customers.
To get More information and benefits about Monitoring and diagnostics for your Design ( Best Practices )
Hope this information is helpful to get you in control of monitoring your Hybrid Cloud Solutions.
Cloud and Datacenter Management Blog 