Monitoring and Alerting in Azure: Best Tools and Techniques

As businesses move their operations to the cloud, monitoring and alerting become critical components of ensuring the performance and reliability of their applications. In this article, we will explore Monitoring and Alerting in Azure: Best Tools and Techniques. Also, how they can help you ensure that your applications and services are running smoothly.

Whether you’re new to Azure or an experienced user, this article will provide valuable insights into the best tools and techniques for monitoring and alerting in Azure, helping you to stay on top of your applications and services and ensure that they’re running smoothly around the clock.

What is Monitoring and Alerting in Azure?

Monitoring and alerting are two essential aspects of managing cloud resources in Azure. Monitoring refers to the process of collecting and analyzing data from various sources, such as metrics, logs, events, and traces, to gain insights into the performance, availability, and health of your applications and infrastructure. Alerting refers to the process of notifying the appropriate stakeholders when a predefined condition or threshold is met or violated, such as a service outage, performance degradation, or a security breach.

Why it is important?

Here we have some factors to know the need for monitoring the Azure resources:

1. Improving the reliability and resilience of your applications and services by detecting and resolving issues before they impact your customers or users.
2. Optimizing the cost and efficiency of your cloud resources by identifying and eliminating waste, over-provisioning, or under-utilization.
3. Enhancing the security and compliance of your cloud environment by detecting and responding to malicious activities, unauthorized access, or policy violations.
4. Increasing the visibility and transparency of your cloud operations by providing a comprehensive and consistent view of your resources across different regions, subscriptions, and services.

Best Tools for Monitoring and Alerting in Azure

Whether running a single application or managing a complex infrastructure, Azure has a range of monitoring and alerting tools (Azure native and third-party tools) to fit your needs. To help you keep a close eye on your Azure resources, we have compiled a list of top monitoring and alerting tools.

1. Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor provides a comprehensive platform for monitoring the health and dependencies of Azure workloads. For example, with Azure Monitor, you can view the status of your VMs on a single map, without the need to log in to each machine individually. This makes it easy to monitor and diagnose network issues, track performance metrics, and identify potential security threats. Whether you are running a small number of VMs or managing a large-scale hybrid cloud environment, Azure Monitor can help you keep your resources running smoothly and efficiently.

Best for providing full observability into your applications, infrastructure, and network.

Cost: It depends upon the log ingestion and pricing tier.

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2. Serverless360

Serverless360 is a leading provider of monitoring and management services for Azure serverless environments. It offers a unified platform that allows you to monitor all your serverless integration solutions from a single location. With advanced security features, such as Azure Active Directory integration, granular user access policy definition, governance, and audit, Serverless360 helps ensure the security of your composite applications.

Best for operations and support for Microsoft Azure serverless resources.

Cost: Offers free trial for 15 days. Can quote price for enterprise plan.

Application Insights is a service offered within Azure Monitor that enables real-time monitoring of your applications. With its automatic anomaly detection, it helps to identify and diagnose performance issues. Additionally, it can be seamlessly integrated with Visual Studio App Center to monitor and analyze telemetry from mobile applications.

Best for monitoring live applications

Cost: Price depends on the volume of data sent by your applications and the number of web tests you choose to run.

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4. Service Bus Explorer

Service Bus Explorer allows developers and administrators to manage Azure Service Bus resources such as queues, topics, subscriptions, and messages. It is a graphical user interface (GUI) that enables users to perform various operations, including creating, deleting, and managing Service Bus entities, sending and receiving messages, monitoring message activity, and configuring entities.

Service Bus Explorer is commonly used in scenarios where users need to debug or diagnose issues with their Service Bus applications or manage Service Bus entities in real-time. The tool provides a user-friendly interface that simplifies common Service Bus operations and reduces the need for complex code or command-line interfaces.

Service Bus Explorer can be used on both Windows and Mac OS, and it supports multiple authentication methods, including Azure Active Directory, Shared Access Signature (SAS), and connection string. It is available as an open-source project on GitHub and can be downloaded and customized to fit specific needs.

Best for connecting to a service bus namespace and administering messaging entities.

Cost: Free

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5. Site24/7

It allows you to monitor 100+ Azure resources and analyze the performance of your entire Azure environment by monitoring and tracking the performance of IaaS services, such as virtual machines (VMs) and Kubernetes, and PaaS services like App Service, Event Hubs, and SQL database.

Best for websites, servers, applications, networks, and cloud resources.

Cost: Offers free plan (monthly monitoring of 5 websites and 10 notifications). Paid plan ($9 per month monitoring 10 websites, 8 test locations, and 50 alert credits).

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6. ManageEngine M365 Manager Plus

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7. Azure Log Analytics

The Azure Log Analytics Agent is a versatile tool designed to gather telemetry from a wide range of computing environments, including Windows and Linux virtual machines hosted in any cloud or on-premise machines. It sends data to a Log Analytics workspace to take advantage of features supported by Azure Monitor Logs, such as log queries. With support for both Windows and Linux operating systems, this agent can collect and consolidate log data from a variety of sources, making it easy to analyze and troubleshoot issues across your entire IT infrastructure.

Best for editing and running log queries against data collected by Azure Monitor logs and interactively analyzing their results.

Cost: Free but charges of data ingested.

Azure Advisor helps you to get recommendations in the Azure portal. It analyzes your resource configuration and usage and provides guidance to improve the availability, security, performance, and cost-effectiveness of your Azure resources. You can select a subscription and optionally a resource group to specify the resources that you want to receive alerts on. You can also configure the action that will take place when a signal is triggered by selecting or creating an action group.

Best for providing personalized recommendations and best practices to optimize your Azure resources.

Cost: Free.

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9. Datadog

Datadog is an observability service for cloud-scale applications, providing monitoring of servers, databases, tools, and services, through a SaaS-based data analytics platform. Datadog is a platform that offers a variety of solutions for monitoring and managing modern applications and infrastructure. It provides tools for network monitoring, application performance monitoring (APM), log management, serverless computing, real-user monitoring, and more.

Best for analyzing large-scale applications and cloud infrastructure.

Cost: You can start free but depending upon the features prices can vary. It offers various plans for APM, Serverless, Security, Log Management, etc.

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10. CloudMonix

CloudMonix is a cloud-based monitoring and automation platform that provides real-time monitoring and management of applications and resources in the Microsoft Azure cloud and on-premises resources for performance and availability. It helps IT teams to detect and resolve issues proactively, minimize downtime, and optimize the performance of their Azure infrastructure.

It offers monitoring for a wide range of Azure resources including Virtual Machines, Web Apps, Databases, Storage Accounts, Service buses, and more. It provides a centralized dashboard to monitor the health, performance, and usage of Azure resources and provides alerts when metrics exceed predefined thresholds.

CloudMonix also offers integrations with third-party tools such as PagerDuty, Slack, and Microsoft Teams to send notifications and alerts to different channels. It provides detailed reports and analytics that help IT teams to identify trends and patterns in their Azure infrastructure and make informed decisions about resource allocation and optimization.

Best for advanced cloud monitoring and automation of various resources. Also, provide self-healing actions.

Cost: CloudMonix is a subscription-based service and offers a free trial for new users. Offers 3 plans: Starter (Free), Professional ($15 per resource per month), and Ultimate ($20 per resource per month).

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Which tool to use?

After going thru so many details of their strength and weakness you might be thinking about which tool to choose. So I have summarized these tools here to help you decide.

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Conclusion

Azure monitoring and alerting is an important aspect of managing and maintaining cloud services to ensure optimal performance, reliability, and security. Additionally, Azure offers integration with third-party monitoring solutions and provides APIs and automation capabilities to streamline monitoring and alerting workflow. Overall, using the best tools and techniques for proactive and effective cloud services.