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June 18, 2020

5 Key Best Practices for Monitoring with Azure Monitor



Whether you are a site reliability engineer, a developer, Ops specialist, or a DevOps professional, monitoring is something you should take into account. Modern applications are moving from on-premises to hybrid or microservices based environments. Therefore, you need to improve your skills sets and adopt some best practices for a successful monitoring strategy.



Azure Monitor is a unified monitoring solution that provides visibility across infrastructure and applications. This solution can help you monitor containers, networks, and databases in Azure.

What is Azure Monitor?

Monitoring your resources and subscriptions is an important part of using Azure. Azure Monitor provides the core monitoring components you need in Azure. This includes the base level reporting metrics for most Azure assets, like activity logs, metrics, and diagnostic logs.

You can access Azure Monitor in the portal. The landing page or blade for Azure Monitor contains information about the Azure monitoring capabilities. The Azure portal is a central location for finding and configuring standard and premium monitoring capabilities. You can also get access to the basic monitoring capabilities within your subscriptions. Here’s what you can find in the portal:

  • Alerts—enables you to view any alerts and rules that were created in your subscriptions. The platform comes with search capabilities and filters for subscriptions and resource groups to help narrow down your search. You can filter for alerts over the past hour, past six hours or 24 hours.
  • Metrics—enables you to see metrics for specific resources. You can see the metrics of the products and resources you are using in Azure by selecting a subscription resource group, and the resource type.
  • Activity log—provides details on activity logs or Windows log events. The activity log shows incidents that happened in your account, like network availability. It also shows logs that include resource changes in your subscriptions. For example resources that have been deleted or added and who did it and when.
  • Service health—shows you if the overall Azure service health has been impacted by any negative events.

What is Monitored By Azure Monitor?

You can monitor many different applications and services with Azure Monitor. For example, you can analyze logs and metrics for core Azure solutions like Azure File Storage accounts, different Azure services, integrations with third-party products like Office 365 and many more. The list below reviews some of the Azure Monitor options:

  • Application Insights—a monitoring service that enables developers and DevOps professionals to monitor live applications. The service automatically detects performance issues, and leverages analytics tools to diagnose these issues.
  • Azure Monitor for Containers— monitors the performance of container workloads deployed to Kubernetes clusters hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), or managed Azure Container Instances.
  • Azure Monitor for Cosmos DB—provides a view of the overall performance, capacity, failures, and operational health of all your Azure Cosmos DB resources.
  • Azure Monitor for Networks—enables you to view the metrics and health of all your network resources. The search capability of this feature enables you to find the hosting resource of your website, by searching for your website name.
  • Azure Monitor for Virtual Machines (VM)—analyzes the health and performance of your Linux and Windows VMs, and monitors their dependencies and processes.
  • SQL Analytics—monitoring performance of all of your Azure SQL databases. Azure SQL Analytics helps you to detect issues at each layer of your application stack. It uses Azure Diagnostic metrics together with Azure Monitor views to present data about all your Azure SQL databases in a single Log Analytics workspace.

Best Practices for Continuous Monitoring with Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor provides continuous monitoring across all your workflows. You can integrate it with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code during development and tests. You can also integrate it with Azure DevOps for release management during deployment. The platform also integrates across the IT Service Management (ITSM) and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools.

Enable monitoring for all your apps

Application monitoring ensures applications are performing as expected. You should add Azure Monitor Application Insights SDKs to your apps if you are working with code. You can also leverage the Insights SDK to specify any metrics, custom events, or page views that are relevant to your app or business.

If you do not have access to code, there are many other monitoring options you can use. Azure DevOps projects, Release templates in Azure Pipelines, status monitor for .NET (News - Alert) apps on Windows Servers and many more. Once you have enabled monitoring across all your apps, you can visualize connections across all the components, and end-to-end transactions.

Enable monitoring for your entire infrastructure

Applications are only as reliable as their underlying infrastructure. Enabling monitoring across your entire Azure infrastructure can help you achieve full observability and simplify the discovery of potential failures.

Azure Monitor tracks the performance and health of your entire hybrid infrastructure including containers, VMs, network, and storage. You automatically get activity logs, platform metrics, and diagnostics logs from most of your Azure resources.

Ensure quality through Continuous Deployment

Integrating monitoring as part Quality Gates can ensure that you are following the Key Performance Metrics (KPIs) when you deploy to production. Your KPIs are not  negatively impacted by changes in the infrastructure environment. You can use Azure Pipelines to set up continuous deployment. You can also automate the entire process from code commit to production if your Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) tests are successful.

Setup actionable alerts

A robust alerting pipeline enables you to set up actionable alerts for all possible failure states. You can configure your alerts based on dynamic or static thresholds and base your actions on these alerts. The alerts can be a simple SMS, email, voice calls, or push notifications. You can set up alerts in your ITSM Tools or any other alert management mechanism through Webhooks.

Prepare role-based dashboards and workbooks

Ensure that your devs and ops have access to the same monitoring tools. Similar monitoring tools enable continuous monitoring and ensure fast Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR).

You can use Azure Monitor as a single monitoring solution for both devs and ops. You can also prepare custom role-based dashboards based on standard logs and metrics. Workbooks is another useful capability that can help devs and ops share resources. Workbooks can be prepared as dynamic reports with log queries and metric charts, or as troubleshooting guides for devs.

Conclusion

Continuous monitoring enables you to include monitoring across each stage of your DevOps and ops workflows. This ensures high performance, reliability, and the health of your infrastructure and apps. Azure monitor can help you reduce MTTD and MTTR while delivering the best solution for your customers. You can also set up an actionable alerting pipeline, integrate it with your existing ITSM and SIEM tools, and automate the monitoring process.

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Author Bio: Farhan Munir

With over 12 years of experience in the technical domain, I have witnessed the evolution of many web technologies, as well as the rise of the digital economy. I consider myself a life-long learner, and I love experimenting with new technologies. I embrace challenges with enthusiasm and outside-of-the-box mindset. I feel it is important to share your experiences with the rest of the world - in order to pass on the knowledge or let other folks learn from your mistakes or successes. In my spare time, I like to travel and photograph the world.

YouTube (News - Alert): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClRk54YiUQ4y237LfGpE9ow


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