Application Delivery and Load Balancing in Microsoft Azure

Chapter 6. Monitoring NGINX in Microsoft Azure

Monitoring application performance is as important as monitoring your network, infrastructure, or security. Applications contain valuable data that you can use to fine-tune performance and function or prevent possible failures. Both Microsoft Azure and NGINX offer several tools and plug-ins for detailed application performance monitoring.

Azure Monitor

Monitoring and understanding your application’s performance and being able to identify and address any issues that may affect the application or its resources are necessary tasks. Azure Monitor collects data from your Azure environment for analysis and proactive planning.

Azure Monitor captures data from a variety of sources, such as the application, OS, or custom sources. The two primary data types, metrics and logs, are kept in data stores. Metrics are measured numerical values or counts that provide a snapshot of the application or system at a specific time. They are light and fast, with a near real-time capability. Logs contain records for all sorts of different data types captured from your telemetry, such as performance data and events.

Data can be collected from any number of sources in your environment. Azure breaks these sources down into application tiers, with your application at the top and continuing down through the operating system and internal Azure resources. Each of these tiers is broken down further into more detailed sources. For example, Azure Monitor can collect ...