1. Monitoring tools
In this video, we'll discuss the main monitoring tools in Azure.
2. Overview of monitoring tools
There are three important monitoring tools in Azure: Azure Monitor, Service Health, and Advisor.
As we have seen before, the main platform for monitoring in Azure is Azure Monitor.
The most important tools we'll discuss are Application Insights, Log Analytics, and Alerts.
We'll discuss these tools in more detail in the following slides.
3. Azure Monitor: Application Insights
Azure Application Insights is used to detect, diagnose, and address issues in web applications by providing insights into performance, availability, and usage.
Typical tasks for Application Insights are viewing and visualizing performance metrics, finding errors and bugs using the Smart Detection feature, and setting up live and automatic monitoring.
4. Azure Monitor: Log Analytics
While Application Insights allows you to monitor web applications specifically, Log Analytics offers a broader monitoring of the Azure environment, including resources, services, and infrastructure.
The two tools can be used in conjunction, for example, to identify broader resource issues affecting an application.
Possible use cases for Log Analytics are tracking the performance of Azure resources, troubleshooting and diagnosing infrastructure and network issues, capacity planning, and ensuring security and compliance.
5. Azure Monitor: Alerts
With the previous tools, Application Insights and Log Analytics, you can view and visualize all sorts of metrics and logs.
But there might also be cases where you don't want to view these continuously, but just want to be alerted when an error shows up or a certain threshold is crossed. This is where Alerts come in.
With Alerts, you can set up automatic responses to specific conditions. These can be alerts based on a specific metric like CPU usage or a logical combination of several conditions. Alerts also allows you to set-up notifications via various channels like email or text message.
Alerts and notifications can also be escalated. For example, first an email is sent, and if the problem persists, a text message is sent as well.
Finally, it is also possible to configure automatic remediation actions if alerts are triggered, for example, by scaling resources or restarting a service.
6. Service Health
Azure Service Health provides information about the current status of Azure Cloud in general: planned maintenance, outages and incidents, and upcoming updates and changes.
The information you receive from the Service Health tool can vary depending on which region is associated with your Azure subscription.
7. Advisor
Azure Advisor will give you specific recommendations to optimize your Azure resources.
Specifically, it can give you feedback for the following categories: cost, to reduce overall Azure spending; security, to identify possible security issues; performance, to improve speed and responsiveness of applications and resources; reliability, for ensuring the availability and resilience of applications, and operational excellence, to apply best practices for efficient resource management and deployment.
Note that the Advisor will not implement the necessary changes automatically; you will need to review each suggestion and take the necessary actions. The Advisor will offer guidance and best practices related to each recommendation.
8. Use case: recommendations from Advisor
Suppose that you and your team are working on optimizing your use of Azure resources for your current project.
You make use of Azure Advisor to help identify optimization opportunities.
Looking through the different categories, you can get a list of specific tasks.
In addition, you can filter for quick fixes and postpone or dismiss irrelevant recommendations.
9. Let's practice!
Now that you know the main monitoring tools, let's put them into practice!