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