Learn the core building blocks of monitoring in Azure, including metrics, logs, dashboards, and alerts, to gain visibility into resource health and behavior.

Introduction to Azure Monitor

Exploring Azure Monitor

Responding to performance issues

Monitoring multiple resources

Collecting and viewing metrics

Collect metrics through storage interactions

Set up dashboards for unified observability

Metrics vs logs use cases

Automated monitoring with alerts

Create alert rule with email notification

Create cost alert for high transaction volume

Simultaneous alerts

Azure Monitor Fundamentals

Explore application-level monitoring, availability testing, and centralized log analysis to detect issues, track performance, and investigate failures.

Exploring Application Insights

Creating Application Insights

Connecting a function app to Application Insights

Monitoring applications

Availability tests

Configuring availability tests

Classifying availability test types and features

Optimizing availability test configuration

Exploring Log Analytics

Creating and exploring a Log Analytics workspace

Log Analytics workspace capabilities

Centralized logging benefits

Application Insights, Availability Tests and Log Analytics

Instrument applications for telemetry, visualize dependencies, and apply performance optimization techniques to troubleshoot and improve Azure solutions.

Instrumenting an app for monitoring

Enabling Application Insights for a web app

Exploring performance and live metrics

Autoinstrumentation and live telemetry

Application map

Exploring application map

Options

Application Map

Other tools

Application map usage

Identifying performance bottlenecks

Optimizing performance

Performance optimization concepts

Caching

Queue-based load leveling

Autoscaling

Performance optimization techniques

Optimizing latency

Instrumentation and troubleshooting

(SAMPLE SEQUENTIAL) Festivus!

Chapter 4

This course focuses on teaching developers how to effectively monitor, observe, and troubleshoot Azure-based applications and services. It is designed for learners who build cloud solutions and need clear visibility into how their systems behave in real-world scenarios, from resource health to application performance.

The course begins by introducing Azure Monitor and the core concepts of observability in the cloud. Learners explore how Azure collects metrics and logs, how dashboards provide a centralized view of system health, and how alerts help teams respond to issues proactively. Through guided exercises, learners work directly with Azure resources to generate metrics, visualize data, and configure alert rules and action groups to notify stakeholders when thresholds are exceeded.

The course then expands into application-level monitoring using Application Insights, availability tests, and Log Analytics. Learners discover how Application Insights captures telemetry such as requests, dependencies, failures, and performance data across Azure services. They also learn how to configure availability tests to monitor application uptime from multiple locations and how Log Analytics enables deep investigation of logs using Kusto Query Language. Hands-on labs reinforce how these tools work together to support diagnostics and root cause analysis.

In the final section, the course focuses on instrumentation and troubleshooting distributed applications. Learners enable monitoring on Azure web apps, examine live telemetry, and use Application Map to visualize service dependencies and identify performance bottlenecks or failure points. The course concludes with performance optimization concepts, helping learners understand when to apply techniques such as caching, throughput tuning, and resource optimization to improve application responsiveness and reliability.

By the end of the course, learners will be able to design monitoring strategies, diagnose issues across Azure services, and optimize application performance using Azure-native tools. The course emphasizes practical, real-world scenarios to ensure learners can confidently monitor and troubleshoot production Azure solutions.

Understanding Microsoft Azure Architecture and Services

Learn how to monitor, diagnose, and optimize Azure applications using Azure Monitor, Application Insights, and Log Analytics.

Monitor and Troubleshoot Azure Solutions

The database is hit repeatedly for the same product catalog data, causing slow page loads during peak hours.

API calls to an external pricing service add 500 milliseconds to every checkout request.

A flash sale triples traffic instantly, overwhelming the order processing system and causing timeouts.

Image processing tasks take 30 seconds each, blocking user requests and degrading overall responsiveness.

CPU usage spikes to 90 percent during business hours but drops to 20 percent overnight, wasting resources.

The application experiences predictable traffic patterns with high load during lunch hours and low load in the evening.

Performance optimization techniques

Monitor and Troubleshoot Azure Solutions

Hands-on interactive exercise