Azure Monitoring: Unlocking Cost and Efficiency for Your Cloud Infrastructure

Steve Rastall (Founder & CEO) 12-Jan-2023 09:48:00

Azure Managed Cloud Service Azure support

Azure monitoring is a critical first step in making the most of your cloud infrastructure and ensuring that it runs smoothly and efficiently. With Azure monitoring capabilities available to your IT team you will gain better visibility into the performance of your Azure resources, enabling you to identify issues quickly while also reducing costs associated with wasted resources. By understanding how Azure works and leveraging its full range of features, Azure users can unlock cost savings as well as increased efficiency for their cloud infrastructure.

What are the options for Azure monitoring?

At a high level, the options for monitoring Azure fall into the following categories:

Native Azure tools
Open-source cloud monitoring tools
Third-party commercial tools

Azure native tools

Azure does provide native tools to monitor, track, and optimize your cloud environment. However, each toolset needs its own mini project to implement and configure on your tenant. Also if you use multiple cloud providers then you would need to carry out this exercise for each cloud provider. Depending on the Azure tools/services you choose to implement the native monitoring tools can have a cost or deploy pieces into your Azure tenant which have a paid component.

Using Azure cloud monitoring tools such as Azure Monitor, Azure Log Analytics or Azure Application Insights can be a potential way to monitor Azure resources. These tools are free and provide an easy way to monitor Azure resources while also giving you the flexibility to customize their configurations. The downside is that these tools lack some of the advanced features available in commercial products and only work on the Azure platform.

Open-source monitoring tools

The open-source monitoring space has really proliferated in recent years and you can find various tools available for Azure monitoring. Open-source Azure monitoring tools range from basic to advanced, depending on the level of customization required. Some popular Azure monitoring tools include:

Prometheus - Monitoring and alerting toolkit. Collection and storage metrics as time series data with labels.
Grafana - Operational dashboards for your data here, there, anywhere
Zabbix - For monitoring anything, (Network monitoring, cloud monitoring (VM focused), App monitoring, service monitoring)
There are many others with ranging functionality but all of these are part of our cloud management solution CloudOps

These open-source tools are a great way to start Azure monitoring, and they can provide a lot of data and insights. However, they can be complex to use and manage as well as there is no direct support available if something goes wrong.

Third-party commercial Azure monitoring tools

Using a third-party commercial Azure monitoring tool can provide a turn-key service that you plug in and get value from day one. Without the need for a time-consuming project to configure and learn about it.

There are a number of commercial products on the market that allow you to monitor Azure. However, you should look for the following when selecting one:

Does it allow more than monitoring Azure? for example does it also include Amazon AWS
Does it include a support provision?
What is it built on / how does it link to your cloud?

The best commercial options will include the functionality of open source tools plus a support option and usually a set of cost and security monitoring as well.

Which monitoring approach is right for your cloud application?

It depends on a number of factors but this is a key decision and one that can accelerate your cloud infrastructure if you get it right or constrain it if you get it wrong.

As an Azure cloud specialist IG CloudOps provides a cloud management service CloudOps which gives you all you need to monitor and manage your Azure cloud. We work with your team to help you implement cloud management and increase efficiency and drive down your monthly cost.

To find out how we can extend your in-house team, get in touch.

Or if you want to see what CloudOps can do then book a test drive to find out more.