Microsoft Azure For Dummies

Chapter 14

Monitoring Your Azure Environment

IN THIS CHAPTER

Plotting metrics and raising alerts with Azure Monitor

Querying log data with Azure Log Analytics

This chapter explains how to check the pulse of all your Azure resources. Monitoring is an important skill for many reasons:

• Track the who, what, when, and where of deployments
• Generate performance baselines
• Manage resource usage costs
• Troubleshoot issues
• Identify and resolve security red flags
• Optimize your environment for cost, speed, security, and availability

By the end of this chapter, you’ll be up to speed with Azure Monitor and Azure Log Analytics.

Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor is your baseline monitoring platform. I say baseline because Azure itself collects essential metric data and allows you to access it at no additional cost. By contrast, Application Insights and Log Analytics are premium monitoring services with their own pricing plans.

Azure Monitor collects two fundamental data types from your resources:

• Metrics: Numerical time-series data that describes some aspect of your Azure resource
• Logs: Text files or tables that describe various system events and metric data

The term telemetry gets a lot of press with regard to Azure; this term simply refers to a resource’s ability to transmit its metric and ...