Azure Monitor

1. Azure Monitor

Welcome back! In this video, we'll discuss the ins and outs of Azure Monitor.

2. Azure Monitor overview

Azure Monitor is the all-in platform for monitoring in Azure. When setting up monitoring processes, you'll typically use the following workflow. First, look up or track the necessary data, like memory usage of a virtual machine. Second, you can use Azure Monitor to analyze and visualize this data, for example, track memory usage peaks in the last month. Finally, you can set up proactive monitoring and alerts to prevent or automatically handle new issues. For example, you can set up an alert if there are any new memory usage peaks. In the following slides, we'll take a closer look at each step of the workflow and how Azure Monitor can assist.

3. Data collection

In the data collection step, there are two types of data Azure Monitor can provide you. The first one is metrics; this is numerical data related to the performance of resources, applications, and services. For example, memory usage of a virtual machine. The second one is logs, which are event data related to actions by users or Azure itself. For example, a list of users who made changes to a virtual machine in the past month. This will also include additional details like the date or which change was made.

4. Analysis and visualization

Once the monitored data from the previous step is collected, we can perform further analysis and create visualizations to help us evaluate how resources and applications are performing and to identify possible issues. For metrics, a typical analysis task would be to calculate statistics or plot charts of the metrics of interest over time. For logs, we can use queries to apply specific filters or create tables or lists. You can do the analysis of metrics and log data within Azure Monitor with the help of its built-in tools. Or, you can export the data to external tools like PowerBI. Later in this chapter, we'll take a closer look at the built-in tools in Azure Monitor.

5. Proactive monitoring and alerts

In addition to analyzing past metrics and log data, Azure Monitor also has some functionality to set up proactive monitoring. You can set up tests, for example, testing a resource's responsiveness or setting up alerts to quickly detect recurring issues. You can also set up business rules to automatically handle specific issues, like sending out an email or running a script. Further automation and machine learning functionality is also available.

6. Example use case: creating an alert processing rule

Suppose you need to set up an alert for spikes in memory usage of a virtual machine. Additionally, when the alert is generated, the Azure engineering team needs to be notified. With the help of Azure Monitor, you can set up an alert for the virtual machine by specifying a memory usage threshold. In addition, you can include a rule that if the alert is generated, an e-mail notification is sent out to the Azure engineering team.

7. Let's practice!

Over to you now!

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