Introduction to Azure Monitoring:

Abstract: This article is an introduction to the programmability aspects of Azure Public cloud monitoring service that is known for its unprecedented scale and flexibility in reporting metrics from the resources hosted on the Azure Public Cloud.

Description: Azure Monitoring helps us maximize the availability of our applications and services hosted on Azure Public Cloud. It is a complete solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on the telemetry from the Cloud Environment.  This monitoring program comprises of an application performance management system called the Application Insights, the host monitoring system called the VM Insights and Container Insights, the Log Analytics solution which allows drill down into the monitoring data, smart alerts, and automated actions which help support operations at scale, and visualizations with dashboard and workbooks. The data collected from this comprehensive solution become part of Azure Monitor Metrics.

Azure Monitoring is not only about metrics, but it is also about logs, and it allows us to gather insights, visualize, analyze, respond, and integrate. The monitoring data platform works for both metrics as well as logs. While events and traces become part of logs, metrics are numerical values that quantify application performance at a given point in time.  The metrics store and its visualization with metrics explorer and the log data and its filtering with Log Analytics are just applications dedicated to their respective data. The Azure Monitor uses the Kusto query language that is suitable for simple log queries that also include advanced functionalities such as aggregations, joins, and smart analytics. Kusto benefits from both SQL and Splunk querying practices.

One of the most interesting aspects of Azure Monitoring is that it collects metrics from Applications, Guest OS, Azure resource monitoring, Azure subscription monitoring, and azure tenant monitoring to include the depth and breadth of the systems involved. Alerts and Autoscale help determine the appropriate thresholds and actions that become part of the monitoring stack, so the data and the intelligence are together and easily navigated via the dashboard.  Azure Dashboards provide a variety of eye-candy charts that better illustrate the data to the viewers than the results of the query. Workbooks provide a flexible canvas for data analysis and the creation of rich visual reports in the Azure Portal.  The analysis is not restricted to just these two. Power BI remains the robust solution to provide analysis and interactive visualizations across a variety of data sources and it can automatically import log data from Azure monitor. Azure Event Hubs is a streaming platform and event ingestion service which permits real-time analytics as opposed to batching or storage-based analysis. APIs from the Azure monitor help with reading and writing data as well as configure and retrieve alerts.