Maximize Efficiency with Azure Monitoring Tools

What are Microsoft Azure Monitoring Tools?

With Azure monitoring services, clients can manage Azure in virtual machines (VMs) or containers, identify bottlenecks and gather data on various other operations. They can use end-to-end monitoring tools to detect or diagnose faults in applications or infrastructure. Microsoft and various third-party platforms offer Azure monitoring tools, allowing for a comprehensive approach to managing and optimizing Azure resources.

Top Azure Monitoring Tools 

Azure monitoring is the process of gathering, combining, comparing, and evaluating security, performance, and health information from the platform's deployed resources and apps. Here are the top and trending Azure monitoring tools based on their popularity and functionality:

Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor is an all-inclusive monitoring solution that lets you gather, examine, and react to monitoring data from your on-premises and cloud settings. It can be used to optimize the performance and availability of your applications and services. It keeps the data on a shared platform so that it may be accessed by a shared set of tools that can correlate, evaluate, visualize, and react to it. 

Pros:

• Azure Monitor provides an easy way to monitor Azure resource usage, providing developers with a comprehensive knowledge of how each resource is utilized.
• The tool for the creation of a single dashboard with full insight into Azure apps and resources by merging all data, metrics, and logs.
• It provides clear visualizations, such as graphs and charts, for understanding resource performance.

Cons:

• It can be difficult to set up, especially for people unfamiliar with Azure or cloud monitoring in general.
• Azure Monitor is costly, particularly if you produce a lot of data or monitor too many resources.
• It may lack all the features you need to monitor certain resources, so you might need to use other tools or services.

Azure Advisor

Azure Advisor is a customized cloud advisor that helps you optimize your Azure deployments by adhering to best practices. After analyzing your resource configuration and usage statistics, it makes recommendations for how to enhance the security, high availability, performance, and affordability of your Azure resources. 

Pros:

• It offers your company highly customized, proactive, and actionable best practices.
• It offers the azure saving plan, which facilitates setting a fixed computing service commitment. 
• It boosts the performance and speed of your apps, which is important for business-critical applications.  

Cons:

• This tool focuses solely on a selection of Azure services, such as Application Gateway, Azure Database for MySQL and more, for which it has analysis and suggestions.
• It has no service level agreement because it is free.

Azure Automation

Microsoft Azure offers Azure Automation, a cloud-based automation service. It enables customers to automate Azure cloud resource creation, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance. It provides a method for scheduling, executing, and monitoring scripts, processes, and workflows on many platforms, such as Linux and Windows. 

Pros: 

• It helps to lower your operating costs by increasing efficiency and decreasing errors.
• It provides smooth and productive development experience.for programs like GitHub and Visual Studio Code 
• It can track changes to files, software, services, and system settings to address issues promptly.

Cons: 

• It has a generic user interface.
• The data center must have outbound internet access to automate on-premises resources.
• Encryption may be required for data kept in cloud storage.

Microsoft Cost Management and Billing

Azure Cost Management and Billing perform billing administrative activities and govern billing access to expenses. With Microsoft Cost Management, an Azure solution, you can track, allocate, and optimize cloud expenditures accurately, efficiently, and transparently.

Pros:

• This tool helps you look at expenses on a daily, monthly, or annual basis to spot patterns and abnormalities as well as chances for savings and optimization.
• It lets you develop a pricing model that groups resources based on tags.
• It helps you divide your resources into several categories by applying the cost entity idea.

Cons:

• It has a learning curve because it requires some Azure services and cloud computing knowledge.
• Although free to use, there can be a fee for some additional features and support.

Azure Service Health

Azure Service Health offers individualized advice and assistance when problems arise with Azure resources and services. It offers a customized picture of the conditions of your Azure services and regions, together with details on upcoming maintenance, health advisories, and issues that are now occurring. 

Pros:

• It allows a comprehensive 360-degree perspective of potential areas for Azure environment optimization.
• It assists in reducing security risks and locating essential security flaws and vulnerabilities. 
• This tool supports in selecting modern Azure services like DevOps, AI, and IoT that could benefit your company. 

Cons:

• Latency concerns cannot be checked or notified.
• Additional details must be added to better interpret the dashboards.
• Alerts arrive in batches every five minutes.

Azure Network Watcher

Network Watcher is primarily used to make network metrics created with virtual machines easier to monitor, debug, and gain insight into the network's health and performance. It aids in troubleshooting network problems, including security, connectivity, and network traffic difficulties. 

Pros:

• Permits monitoring via VPN or express route between Azure and on-premises systems for hybrid settings. 
• It allows you to identify and fix the most prevalent VPN Gateway and Connection problems.
• Enables connection monitoring between two places, such as a web application and a database, by monitoring from one endpoint to another.

Cons:

• Covers a monthly total of 1,000 Network Diagnostic Tool checks. After reaching this cap, Microsoft charges $1 for every 1,000 further checks.
• Azure only permits one Network Watcher instance per region.
• Relocating the Network Watcher resource or its associated resources between areas is not supported.

Turbo360 (Serverless360)

Turbo360 is a highly rated Azure monitoring tool for complicated connections developed on Azure. It distinguishes itself by providing all the tools required to implement FinOps practice across your company, guaranteeing a precise and detailed source of cost information for all of your stakeholders.

Pros:

• Allows you to control the cost and automatically record your whole Azure infrastructure.
• Lowers OP-EX and total cost of ownership for Azure solutions. 
• Provides end-to-end distributed tracing for both hybrid and cloud-native integrations.

Cons:

• Refuses to allow cost assessments of Google Cloud.
• Includes initial setup complexity for new users and the steep learning curve for advanced capabilities.
• Needs comprehensive instructions and documentation. 

Dynatrace

Dynatrace is an advanced visibility platform and application performance management (APM) tool for IT operations that monitors and manages application, infrastructure, and user experience performance. It provides thorough insights into every part of the technology stack, including networks, databases, apps, and microservices.

Pros:

• Provides seamless connectivity with other Azure resources.
• Provides comprehensive application performance insights, such as code-level visibility and transaction tracking, to help diagnose performance problems.
• Enables dashboards and reports to be customized to show particular metrics relevant to your needs.

Cons:

• Hard to navigate its interface because of its intricacy.
• It has the potential to lead to excessive CPU and memory use. 
• It supports specific programming languages, legacy systems, and frameworks entirely or very little.

Datadog

Datadog offers a range of application monitoring features that enable users to efficiently search, filter, and examine logs for troubleshooting and exploratory data analysis, ultimately enhancing the performance of applications, platforms, and services. 

Pros:

• Datadog can gather data and incidents from the entire DevOps stack smoothly. 
• It can offer a complete platform-wide visibility into both on-premises and cloud settings.
• This permits clients to share KPIs and SLA/SLO adherence with engineering teams, management, and other stakeholders.

Cons:

• It can be costly, particularly for large organizations or those with large data sets.
• It can be difficult to set up Datadog, particularly in large or complicated IT systems.
• It has a data storage limit, so you may have to pay extra or find alternative means of data storage.

New Relic

New Relic is a web-based solution for full-stack Azure monitoring. You can monitor web browsers, applications, infrastructure, and other parts on a single platform. It monitors and gives you real-time information on the performance of your web application. 

Pros:

• This tool provides thorough documentation for the installation procedure.
• It lets you view your web application's data on a single screen.
• It can keep track and generate logs for client mistakes. 

Cons:

• It has a complicated pricing structure and may increase in cost as demands develop.
• Inability to view a collection of apps' or team's overall status using the default dashboard or user interface.
• This tool lacks a user interface feature to manage or suppress excessive alerts.

Conclusion

IT teams can ensure the proper operation of their workloads by using a range of Azure monitoring tools to gain visibility into their cloud environment. These tools can be useful when something is wrong or when an IT team needs to troubleshoot a problem.

So, to advance in your cloud career path, you must master Azure and its fundamentals. Simplilearn's Microsoft Azure Cloud Architect lets you learn the fundamentals of Azure and create scalable solutions. Moreover, the Microsoft Certified Azure Data Engineer Associate certification course helps you further master data integration, transformation, and consolidation on Azure. Enroll now to learn essentials and gain hands-on experience with key Azure services!

FAQs

1. What are the key features of Azure Monitor?

Across several Azure and non-Azure subscriptions and tenants, Azure Monitor gathers and aggregates data from every tier and component of your system. It allows for the personalization of data collection, enabling agencies to focus on various specific metrics and logs most relevant to their applications and infrastructure.

2. How does Azure Monitor collect data?

Azure Monitor gathers and combines data from all system layers and parts, including multiple Azure and non-Azure subscriptions and tenants. It saves the data on a shared platform so that a shared set of tools can correlate, analyze, visualize, and react to it.

3. What are Azure Monitor Metrics?

Azure Monitor Metrics is an aspect of Azure Monitor that stores numeric data from monitored resources in a time-series database. Metrics are numerical numbers that characterize a particular system element at a given time and are gathered at regular intervals.