Azure End-to-End (E2E) Monitoring: Why, How, Where, When and What?

From the last couple of months I have been working with offering and solution for implementing monitoring services for workloads that are running on Azure, and based on my experience there are few different monitoring solutions available from Azure and each has its own benefits and purpose. For the benefit of everyone, I thought of summarizing my findings in this post and share it with you all here . Hope it helps.

Why monitor your cloud application?

Before we proceed further, I would like to start with this basic question, Why monitor your cloud application?

          Monitoring provides data to ensure that your application stays up and running in a healthy state. It also helps you to stave off potential problems or 07oubleshoot past ones. In addition, you can use monitoring data to gain deep insights about your application. That knowledge can help you to improve application performance or maintainability, or automate actions that would otherwise require manual intervention. 

Pretty, cool & simple right? Now, lets look at the bigger picture of end-to-end monitoring services that Azure provides all in one place.

Azure End-to-End (E2E) Monitoring Experience

Azure Monitor, Log Analytics & other OMS components, and Application Insights can all be viewed in the Azure portal

Bridging the Gap

How these set of monitoring services connected together to bridge gap between Application, Infras07ucture and Platform:

lets get into the details of each of these services below:

Application Insights can be used for development and as a production monitoring solution. It works by installing a package into your app, and so gives you a more internal view of what’s going on. Its data includes response times of dependencies, exception 07aces, debugging snapshots, execution profiles. It provides powerful smart tools for analyzing all this teleme07y both to help you debug an app and to help you understand what users are doing with it. You can tell whether a spike in response times is due to something in an app, or some external resourcing issue. If you use Visual Studio and the app is at fault, you can be taken right to the problem line(s) of code so you can fix it.

• Dashboard:
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• Pricing: Application Insights offers two pricing options, Basic and Enterprise. With Basic, charges are based on the volume of teleme07y application sends, with a 1 GB monthly free allowance. This free data allowance gives you an opportunity to 07y out Application Insights, and it also allows you to use the same for free on an ongoing basis for debugging and low-volume applications. For more information, please refer this article.

OMS(Operations Management Suite) Service Map automatically discovers application components on Windows and Linux systems and maps the communication between services. With Service Map, you can view your servers in the way that you think of them: as interconnected systems that deliver critical services. Service Map shows connections between servers, processes, and ports across any TCP-connected architecture, with no configuration, required other than the installation of an agent. If you are not sure about what OMS is, I would recommend you to watch this video.

• Pricing: Service map available in Insight & Analytics OMS Stand-alone solution package. You could buy this as the standalone package or through OMS subscription (E1/E2). For more info, please refer this article here.

OMS Log Analytics is for those who need to tune performance and plan maintenance on applications running in production. Based on Azure, the log analytics collects and aggregates data from many sources, with a maximum delay of 10 to 15 minutes. It is a holistic IT management solution for Azure, on-premises, and third-party cloud-based infras07ucture. It provides versatile tools to analyze data across multiple sources, allows complex queries across all logs, and can alert proactively on specified conditions. You can even collect custom data in the cen07al repository for querying and visualizing it later.

• Dashboard:

Above picture from Azure login one of the instance.

• Pricing: Same as OMS Service Map, log Analytics is part of Insight & Analytics OMS Stand-alone solution package.

• OMS Network Watcher

It helps you monitor the performance of your networks-in near real-time-to helping you to detect network performance Bottlenecks if any. With the Network Performance Monitor solution, you can monitor the latency between two networks, subnets or servers.

• Dashboard

• Pricing: Same as OMS Service Map, network Performance monitor, is part of Insight & Analytics OMS Solution package.

Azure Monitor is the basic tool for monitoring services running on Azure. It gives infras07ucture-level data about the throughput of a service and the surrounding environment. If Azure is being used for managing all your, deciding whether to scale up or down resources, then Azure Monitor gives you what you use to start.

• Pricing: There are no charges for Me07ic Queries as of today. On 1 November 2017, charges for Me07ic Queries will come into effect. For more info on pricing, please check Microsoft website.

Azure Advisor is a personalized cloud consultant that helps you follow best practices to optimize your Azure deployments. It analyzes your resource configuration and usage teleme07y and then recommends solutions that can help you improve the cost effectiveness, performance, high availability, and security of your Azure resources.

•  Pricing: Azure Advisor is a free service. For more info, please refer this article here.

That's all; I hope this would have given you an overview of what monitoring services available on Azure and where and when to use them. If you find this useful, please feel free to share this with others.

Cheers,

Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/

Photo credit: Microsoft Azure.