Additional Monitoring Options in Azure

Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines are a very foundational and fundamental resource in Cloud Computing. Deploying virtual machines gives you more flexibility and control over your cloud infrastructure and services, however, it also means you have more responsibility to maintain and configure these resources. This course gives you an overview of why use virtual machines as well as how to create, configure, and monitor VMs in Azure Resource Manager.

Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines: What You'll Learn

Lesson	What you'll learn
Overview	Overview of the course and the Learning Objectives
What is a Virtual Machine?	Understand what are Azure Virtual Machines and what workloads are ideal for VMs
Creating and Connecting to Azure VMs	Learn to deploy Windows and Linux VMs as well as how to connect to these VMs
Scaling Azure Virtual Machines	Understand VM scaling, load-balancing, and Availability Sets in Azure Resource Manager
Configuration Management	Understand the basic concepts of Desired State Configuration and the options available to Azure VMs
Design and Implement VM Storage	Gain an understanding of the underlying Storage options available to VMs as well as Encryption
Configure Monitoring & Alerts for Azure VMs	Learn to monitor VMs in Azure Resource Manager as well as configure alerts.
Summary	Course summary and conclusion

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/log-analytics/

Monitoring in Azure goes well beyond IaaS VMs and I felt it’s worth mentioning. Azure has an entire Application Performance Management (APM) suite called “Application Insights” which let you monitor live web application traffic and automatically detect performance anomalies as well as offer tools to help you diagnose issues and user behaviors.

In addition there is a framework called Log Analytics as part of Microsoft’s Operations Management Suite (OMS) that help you monitor not only your cloud environment, but also your on-premises environment. This illustration taken from Microsoft’s documentation shows how VM Agents and storage accounts in Azure can feed into the Log Analytics framework as well as your on-premises environment with System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). This gives you a unified solution across cloud and on-premises to manage monitoring and alerting in your environment.

One other major suite released recently is Azure Monitor. This gives you even deeper monitoring insight in your environment. For example you can now monitor not only the Guest OS of an Azure VM, but also you gain monitoring capability of the Host VM. It’s definitely worth exploring all these options.