Azure Monitor focuses on one specific single resource and is thus very accessible to configure. If you would like to analyze and get insights across various Azure resources and multiple subscriptions, the existing feature Log Analytics may be a better fit.
Much appreciated is the fact that the information is real-time available and integrates well with other Azure products or third party visualization tools using either live streaming or reading data from an archive in Azure storage. Additionally, the information stream can be routed to Azure Event Hubs and is directly accessible by any application.
All the information collected from the activity log metrics can be visualized per resource in the metrics section. Since one of my logical apps fails from time to time, I am particularly interested in its success rate.
To find out more, let’s first navigate to the metrics section and select the resource. Next, we select the values which are interesting to us. Choose from various types of data collection points to visualize your result.
The metrics provide some easy going statistic generation without any complexity. I hope that the chart types will be extended in the future, as we are now limited to Bar and Line choises.
Another cool feature I like is the integration with Microsoft Azure’s dashboard, which allows to deploy the current metrics chart directly to the dashboard by a single click on the “Pin to dashboard” button!
Metric values: an alert is triggered when a specific event happens based on a threshold.
Activity log events: an alert is triggered when a specific event happens in the log.
e.g., A machine has been shut down.
In our scenario, I’ll set up an email notification, which will alert me in case my logical app execution fails.
To do so, navigate to the alerts section and select the resource. If no diagnostics have been configured yet, configure this action to enable the alerts notification functionality.
Once diagnostics is in place, create a new alert using the button “add metric alert”. Provide your specific values. In our case study, I am interested to find out whether or not my application failed more than five times over the last fifteen minutes.
Whenever the setup threshold is exceeded, you’ll receive an email. Unfortunately, I also have to add that the preview version does come with some bugs – as shown by the picture down below.
Log Analytics to collect and analyze real-time data generated by resources in cloud and on-premises environments.
Application Insights (monitoring) for visualization, diagnostics, query, alerting, auto scale and automation of Azure infrastructure.
I’m especially impressed by the high accessibility of Microsoft Azure monitor: no complex configuration is required at all. It is easy to set up and perfectly suitable for even smaller scenario’s. At the same time, it can be integrated with Azure Insights monitoring or third party tools if you need to further explore this monitoring scenario. The application logs where already accessible in the past, but very shredded available. Having the information in real-time available in one portal, only adds to Microsoft Azure’s value.
But of course, since this is only a preview release, one can expect to encounter some small bugs in its functionality. In summary, I’m definitely looking forward to the next release.