Azure Monitoring Tools for 2023

Introduction

Azure Monitor is a cloud-based service in Microsoft Azure that provides a unified solution for monitoring and managing the performance of your Azure resources, applications, and infrastructure. Azure Monitor collects data from various sources, such as performance metrics, logs, and events, and provides insights and alerts to help you troubleshoot issues and optimize performance. This article covers detailed knowledge of Azure monitoring tools for 2023.

Features of Azure Monitor

The following are some of Azure Monitor’s key features:

Metrics: Azure Monitor collects and analyzes performance metrics from various sources, including Azure resources and applications. You can use pre-built metrics or create custom metrics to monitor specific performance characteristics.

Logs: Azure Monitor collects and analyzes logs from various sources, including Azure resources, applications, and custom sources. You can use pre-built log queries or create custom log queries to analyze log data and identify issues.

Alerts: Azure Monitor provides real-time alerts based on specific metrics, thresholds, or events. You can configure alerts to notify you via email, SMS, or other methods when issues occur.

Dashboards: Azure Monitor provides customizable dashboards that enable you to visualize and analyze performance metrics and log data. You can create custom dashboards to monitor specific resources or applications.

Machine Learning: Azure Monitor includes machine learning capabilities that enable you to detect anomalies and trends in your performance data. You can use machine learning to automate issue detection and remediation.

Integration with other Azure Services: Azure Monitor integrates with other Azure services, such as Azure Automation and Azure Functions, to enable automated remediation and orchestration.

Application Insights: Azure Monitor includes Application Insights, a monitoring and analytics service that helps you diagnose issues and understand how users interact with your applications. Application Insights provides performance monitoring, log analysis, and end-to-end transaction tracing.

Network Monitoring: Azure Monitor includes Network Watcher, a service that provides network monitoring and diagnostic capabilities for Azure resources. Network Watcher has network topology visualization, packet capture, and flow log analysis features.

Importance of Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor is essential for monitoring and maintaining the health and performance of your Azure resources and applications. The following are some key reasons why Azure Monitor is necessary:

Proactive Monitoring: Azure Monitor provides proactive monitoring capabilities that help detect issues before they impact your business. It uses a variety of metrics and logs to monitor the performance of your resources, applications, and services. Azure Monitor alerts you when it detects anomalies, enabling you to take proactive action to prevent or mitigate issues.

Efficient Troubleshooting: Azure Monitor enables efficient troubleshooting of issues by providing a centralized location to view and analyze logs and metrics from various sources. With Azure Monitor, you can quickly identify the root cause of problems and take corrective action.

Improved Performance: Azure Monitor provides performance monitoring capabilities that help optimize the performance of your resources and applications. With Azure Monitor, you can monitor resource utilization and identify optimization opportunities to improve your applications’ performance.

Cost Optimization: Azure Monitor helps optimize costs by providing insights into resource utilization and identifying opportunities to maximize resource consumption. With Azure Monitor, you can monitor resource usage and identify opportunities for right-sizing, which can reduce your Azure costs.

Compliance: Azure Monitor helps you maintain compliance by providing auditing and compliance monitoring capabilities. With Azure Monitor, you can monitor user activity and resource changes to ensure compliance with regulatory and corporate policies.

Best Azure Monitoring Tools

• Application Insights

As cloud environments become more complex and the threat landscape evolves, the need for comprehensive and efficient security management across multiple cloud providers will only grow.

Features

• Application Insights provides a powerful analytics tool to diagnose issues.
• It supports apps on platforms like .NET, Node.js, Java, etc., hosted on-premise, hybrid, or any public cloud.
• It can be integrated with your DevOps process.
• It has connection points for various development tools.

• Azure Monitor

Azure includes some management and governance tools by default. These tools will allow you to manage and secure your hybrid cloud resources. One of these tools is Azure Monitor. It is a platform for monitoring your Linux and Windows virtual machines and their health and dependencies on a single map. Logging into virtual machines is unnecessary for monitoring and troubleshooting network issues.

Features

• A centralized, fully managed, and scalable data store that can store and analyze all your operational telemetry. It is optimized for performance and cost.
• It has an advanced analytic engine, interactive query language, and built-in machine-learning constructs.
• It can be integrated with popular DevOps, issue management, IT service management, security information, and event management tools.

• Cerebrata

Cerebrata is an Azure management tool that allows you to manage a variety of Azure Services such as Azure Subscriptions, Storage, Cosmos DB, Service Bus, and so on.  The tool allows you to explore Classic Cloud Services running Azure Subscriptions and perform basic management operations.

Features

• It includes tools for managing databases, containers, stored procedures, triggers, user-defined functions, etc.
• It includes a user interface or built-in console for managing databases and keys in Redis Cache accounts.
• It will also allow you to perform basic account management operations.
• You can manage your accounts’ blob, file, queue, and table storage.
• You can manage queues, topics, subscriptions, and messages in your Service Bus accounts.

• CloudMonix

CloudMonix is a tool for monitoring cloud and on-premises resources. It will keep track of performance and availability. It will notify you of any production problems. It has the capabilities and features to automate real-time recovery procedures and auto-scale resources.

Features

• CloudMonix offers comprehensive and immediate insight into the stability of complex software systems. It has dashboards for performance, status, and alerts, among other things.
• Scripting common responses to production issues can automate recovery procedures.
• It can be integrated with third-party software to improve operational efficiency.

• Dynatrace

Dynatrace provides an Azure monitoring solution that enables advanced observability across your entire Azure environment. Dynatrace provides visibility on a large scale of hosts, VMs, containers and orchestration, network, devices, logs, events, etc. It offers AI-assisted problem detection with root cause analysis.

Features

• Dynatrace includes auto-discovery and continuous dependency mapping capabilities.
• It automates monitoring Azure Cloud Services like App Service, Cosmos DB, AKS, and others.
• It offers full-stack observability, which includes metrics, logs, and traces.

• New Relic

New Relic is an Application Performance Monitoring platform allowing you to understand application performance, dependencies, and bottlenecks instantly. It can show page load times, error rates, slow transactions, and a list of servers where the app is running.

Features

• It includes database monitoring features that provide a detailed overview of database performance.
• It includes Alert policies, which allow you to set thresholds for groups of applications.
• It includes tools for creating and receiving customized reports.
• It provides reporting on deployments, availability, and performance.

Conclusion 

Azure Monitor is a powerful and flexible monitoring solution for cloud-based applications and infrastructure hosted on Microsoft Azure. It provides comprehensive insights into the health and performance of your applications, virtual machines, and other Azure resources, allowing you to detect and diagnose issues quickly and efficiently.

Azure Monitor is an essential tool for any organization that uses Microsoft Azure for its cloud-based applications and infrastructure. It can help you achieve a more robust, reliable, and efficient cloud environment.