Introduction to Azure Monitor

1. Introduction to Azure Monitor

Hi everyone, and welcome to the course, Monitor and Troubleshoot Azure Solutions.

2. About the instructor

I'm Ebadur, and I'll be your instructor. I'm a senior cloud engineer with experience across multiple industries where I've worked on building cloud solutions, I can't wait to guide you through this course!

3. The cost of flying blind

Imagine this scenario: your team has deployed a web application serving thousands of customers. At 2 AM on a Saturday, the application starts throwing errors. Users can't complete purchases. By the time someone notices on Monday morning, you've lost a weekend's worth of revenue and frustrated your most loyal customers.

4. Failing applications

This happens more often than you'd think. Without proper monitoring, cloud applications fail silently. You only discover problems when users complain, or worse, when they leave. Azure Monitor exists to prevent exactly this situation. It's not just about collecting data. It's about giving you the visibility to catch problems before they impact users, and the tools to diagnose issues in minutes instead of hours.

5. Why monitoring matters

If you're completing the AZ204 track, you've built storage accounts, deployed functions, and configured databases. But building is only half the job.

6. Production failures

In production, things break, networks fail, traffic spikes, and code behaves differently under load. As a developer, your responsibility extends beyond deployment to keeping applications healthy and performant.

7. Safety net

Azure Monitor is your safety net. It continuously collects telemetry from every resource you deploy, from virtual machines to storage accounts to web applications. More importantly, it helps you act on that data before small issues become outages.

8. Course overview

By the end of this course, you’ll understand why Azure Monitor is essential for building reliable cloud applications. You’ll learn how metrics, logs, alerts, and Application Insights work together to detect issues early, reduce downtime, and optimize performance - skills that directly support you for the AZ-204 exam and for real world cloud development.

9. Metrics

Metrics in Azure Monitor are measurements that give you real-time insights into the performance and health of your resources. Think of them as a heartbeat for your cloud services. They track key indicators like CPU usage, memory consumption, or network activity. By reviewing these metrics, you can quickly spot any issues before they become problems.

10. Logs

Logs capture detailed event-level information. While metrics tell you "response time increased," logs tell you "this specific user request failed with this error message at this timestamp." Logs give you the forensic detail needed to diagnose root causes.

11. Alerts

Alerts transform monitoring from passive observation to active protection. Instead of watching dashboards constantly, you define conditions that matter, and Azure notifies you automatically. If availability drops below 99 percent at 3 AM, you'll know within minutes.

12. Dashboards

Dashboards bring everything together in a single view. You can pin metrics, logs, and alert status from multiple resources, giving your team a unified picture of application health.

13. Before you begin

We want you to be in the best position when taking this course. We recommend completing the Understanding Microsoft Azure Architecture and Services course first, which covers the basics of cloud computing in Azure and introduces key programming concepts.

14. Let's practice!

Let's jump in and practice!

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