This continues from the previous post:

In addition to data security, monitoring plays an important role in maintaining the health and hygiene of data.

Azure Monitor is a centralized management interface for monitoring workloads anywhere. The monitoring data comprises of metrics and logs. With this information, there are built-in capabilities to support responses to the monitoring information in several ways. Monitoring everything from code through to the platform provides holistic insights.

The key monitoring capabilities include: Metrics Explorer to view and graph small, time-based metric data, Workbooks for visualization, reporting and analysis of monitoring data, Activity logs for REST API write actions performed on Azure resources, Azure monitor logs for advanced, holistic analytics, using Kusto query language, Monitoring insights for resource specific monitoring solutions, and alerts and action groups for alerting, automation and incident management.

The monitoring information cannot all be treated the same as for those from resources. For this reason, there are diagnostic settings available that help us to differentiate the treatment we provide to certain types of monitoring information.  Platform monitoring diagnostic setting helps us to route data for platform logs, and metrics. Similarly, there are multiple data categories available which enable us to treat them differently. Some of the treatments involve sending the data to a storage account to retain and analyze them, sending the data to a Log Analytics workspace for powerful analytics or sending the data to Event Hubs to stream to external systems.

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 a 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.