Azure monitoring continued...

 

Azure Monitoring also performs continuous monitoring which refers to processes and tools for monitoring each phase of the DevOps and IT operations lifecycles. It helps to continuously ensure the health, performance and reliability of the application and the infrastructure as it moves from deployment to production. It builds on Continuous Integration and Continuous deployment which are ubiquitously embraced by organizations for software development. Azure Monitoring is a unified monitoring solution that provides transparency to the application, runtime, host and cloud infrastructure layers. As a continuous monitoring tool, Azure Monitor allows gates and rollback of deployments based on monitoring data. Software releases to the services hosted in the cloud and have very short software development cycles and must pass through multiple stages and environments before it is made public.  Monitoring data allows any number of environments to be introduced without sacrificing the controls for software quality and gated release across environments. The data not only allows thresholds to be set but also alerts so that appropriate action may be taken. As the software makes its way to the final production environment, the alerts increase in levels and become more relevant and useful for eliminating risks from production environment.

It may be argued that tests and other forms of software quality control achieve that as the software goes through the CI/CD pipeline. While this is true, the software quality is enhanced by monitoring data because it is not intrusive or vulnerable to flakiness that many tests are prone to in different environments. The monitoring data, its visualization with dashboards need to be set only once even as the code and tests change over time. The investments in continuous monitoring and its implications boost the planning and predictability of software releases.

Monitoring has tremendous breadth and depth of scope, so a question about cost may arise. It can monitor individual Azure resources and it can monitor those resources for their availability, performance and operation.  Some monitoring data is collected by default and the monitoring data platform can be tapped to get more data from all participating monitoring agents. There is no cost associated with collecting, exporting and analyzing data by default. Costs might be associated with storage if a storage account is used or with ingestion if a workspace is used or with streaming if Azure Event Hubs are used. Monitoring involves a cost when running a long query, creating a metric or log query alert rule, sending a notification from any alert rule and accessing metrics through the API. At the resource level, the resource logs and platform metrics are automatically collected. At the subscription level, the activity log is automatically collected.