Microsoft Azure is a cloud platform known for its ability to build and deliver flexible and scalable cloud services efficiently. However, the complexity within the Azure cloud network increases with the size and functions of cloud services deployed. To untangle the complexities and understand the Azure cloud, you need to have clear visibility into your Azure services and applications at any given moment. This can only be achieved by monitoring Azure cloud in real time.

What is Azure monitoring?

Azure monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing the performance, health, and availability of applications in the Azure cloud. It's essential to collect telemetry data like metrics, logs, and traces to gain comprehensive real-time insights and identify performance anomalies. Organizations can proactively manage their infrastructure, optimize application performance, and quickly identify and resolve issues by carefully monitoring their Azure services.

Why is a dedicated tool needed to monitor Azure?

Azure's native monitoring solutions like Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Application Insights help you understand your cloud performance and health. But they limit your visibility to metric trails about Azure cloud KPIs alone. Given today's evolving cloud engineering strategies, you would need multiple cloud native solutions to monitor the rest of your multi/hybrid cloud infrastructure. This leaves the load of correlating and analyzing critical cloud KPIs to assess overall cloud performance on the cloud administrators. But a dedicated cloud monitoring solution helps you centralize your cloud monitoring experience and enables you to access all your cloud performance data from one place.

A capable Azure monitoring tool helps you analyze performance, cloud behavior, provide futuristic insights, and present it in a easily understandable dashboard. This makes it easy for cloud admins to stay vigilant and proactive about potential performance challenges while planning capacity and resources.

What to look for in an Azure monitoring solution

Here are a few prerequisites for choosing a tool to monitor Azure cloud.

1. Comprehensive insights: Make sure that your monitoring tool provides real-time tracking for your business-critical Azure performance metrics. You should be able to monitor all your cloud services, applications, and components from one place and correlate metric-based analysis to understand the component behavior efficiently. Reports on each KPI, from generic metrics like CPU, memory, availability, response time, etc. to cloud-specific metrics like query stats, boot time, invocations, and exceptions in real time help you understand your cloud health and performance on a granular level. A bonus, if you employ tools with inbuilt AI capabilities, is that these help forecast the performance, usage, and growth of the cloud resources.
2. Automatic Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM): The installation and configuration of the monitoring tool should not cost you significant time and expense. It is always better to opt for a tool that allows you to autodiscover your cloud applications and services and lets you monitor on the go. Manually configuring a monitor for each Azure service like App Service, MariaDB, MongoDB, etc. is a tedious task, especially when you have a disparate, dynamic infrastructure. ADDM enables you to autodiscover your Azure services and cloud components, and visualize the dependencies among them in neat and understandable maps.
3. Scalability: The dynamic nature of Azure environments requires a monitoring tool that can adapt to the size and scaling of the cloud infrastructure. Employing a tool that efficiently scales helps you maintain consistency in cloud monitoring without requiring you to switch tools or repeat the purchase process when you add services to expand your cloud infrastructure.
4. Multi-cloud monitoring: Managing a multi or hybrid cloud infrastructure involves monitoring multiple cloud platforms, along with Azure. Each cloud vendor brings its own native monitoring tool to the table, creating multiple data silos that make it difficult to access and analyze overall cloud performance from a single screen. The independent operation of these cloud monitoring tools blurs your view into your cloud infrastructure and requires you to correlate the performance data manually. Evaluating cloud performance becomes a close to impossible task, given the tons of performance data that is obtained from each cloud native monitoring solution. Also, too many screens limit your ability to respond to issues promptly and make data-driven decisions. It is better to adapt a cloud monitoring solution that can accommodate other cloud vendors along with Azure to eliminate blind spots and bring all the data silos under one ceiling.
5. Proactive monitoring approaches: Monitoring Azure cloud in real time helps you understand and assess Azure cloud performance at a given time. You can prepare for potential bottleneck issues and cloud downtime with proactive monitoring techniques like performance forecasts and anomaly detection. A tool that provides you with proactive monitoring techniques like predictive analysis, load analysis, data request simulation, etc. helps you stay a step ahead of the challenges of Azure cloud monitoring.
6. AI and ML based monitoring technologies: Complex IT environments, with their intricate interdependencies and dynamic nature, require a level of sophistication that traditional monitoring tools simply cannot provide. AI and ML-based monitoring technologies offer a transformative solution, leveraging cutting-edge techniques to elevate IT operations to new heights. Here's how they can help:
   • AI powered alerts: Like any large-scale cloud platform, an ecosystem like Azure can generate a significant number of alerts every hour. Focusing on the alerts that directly impact system performance is a challenge. AI-powered alerts make it easy to prioritize and assign alerts based on the severity. With features like automated alert escalation and triggering responsive actions on alert generation, it is easier to improve mean time to detect and mean time to repair by a significant percentage. This helps ensure a seamless user experience. Assigning smart adaptive threshold profiles for dynamic attributes helps eliminate false alarms and alert noise. This saves a notable amount of time and headspace for the admin teams.
   • Machine learning-based analytics: Monitoring tools use predictive analysis to forecast future performance trends based on periodic data. This analysis helps identify potential bottlenecks by indicating deviations in KPI trends. This helps admins stay informed about potential performance issues and system failures. You'll be able to predict resource requirements in the future and plan capacity and resources accordingly to ensure fair resource allocation and thereby smooth cloud operation.
7. Flexible integrations: Make sure that the tool you choose offers integrations with other operational management tools. This helps you centralize your monitoring experience, access, and correlate critical performance data with ease. It is better to avoid solutions that involve third party agents for integrations that might increase your expenses.

Monitoring Azure cloud might seem challenging, but you can make it easier by adapting the features mentioned above. Take a minute to assess and compare the multiple options you've got in the market.

About ManageEngine Applications Manager

ManageEngine Applications Manager is one of the most recommended Azure monitoring tools in the market. It provides performance monitoring and observability for over 150 technologies that include cloud apps, services, web servers, databases, VMs, container environments, ERP, Middleware and many more. The tool's monitoring support for applications deployed on cloud environments like Azure, AWS, Google, and Oracle helps administrators ensure uninterrupted application uptime and seamless user experience. It's easy to use, and only takes a couple of minutes to install and configure. You can download a 30-day free trial and evaluate its features to see if it aligns with your vision and needs.