Monitoring Different Resources in Azure

Monitoring

Monitoring an application or a system has traditionally been done with popular tools like Nagios or PRTG. The monitoring tool is a separate (and distinct) application than the application it’s monitoring. Your organization must care for, manage, feed, and typically have a dedicated person or team working with it. A separate tool to monitor an application or system doubles the effort. Your organization ends up spending a lot of time monitoring the monitoring tool! It’s an entirely separate component you now have to be responsible for.

On the flip side, if you’re in Azure, monitoring is built-in. You don’t have to worry about maintaining the server that the monitoring tool is running on or dedicating a team for management. Instead, you have all of the tools needed for application monitoring, server monitoring, code monitoring, and even container monitoring. In this chapter, we’ll take a look at just that.

Most monitoring solutions target one specific component or area of an application or infrastructure like monitoring hardware resources or application components, but Azure monitoring is different. Monitoring in Azure consists of different “layers” of monitoring built right in.

The term “Azure monitoring” encompasses a wide range of monitoring functionality from VMs, VM guest OSes, cloud billing, containers, and applications. Primarily, there are two ways to “monitor” in Azure either through the Azure Monitor service or via the simple monitoring interface for the various resources.

Built-in Azure resource monitoring

Many resources in Azure have built-in ways to do some simple monitoring. You can find this ability on many resource Overview blades, the Activity Log, or perhaps the Diagnose and solve problems blade. For example, take a look at the screenshot below of monitoring an Azure Virtual Machine. It shows the average CPU, network bandwidth, disk bytes, and disk operations. Built-in resource monitoring allows you to query all the way back 30 days. This service is built into the cost of the VM.