Hi,
In this section, we will learn more about Azure monitoring and its usages. When we think about monitoring, monitoring happens at various stages in azure. Let’s have a closer look at this.
- Activity Logging:- Activity Logging is important to understand on what is happening with our resources in Azure. Every change done to resource is logged as part of activity which is very good as part of audit and also to check “who has done what”. Activity log consists of detailed information on activities. One point to note here that retention period of activity log is 90 days and later on it can be archived to storage account or sent to Azure Log Analytics.
- Health of Azure services:- Azure service health can provide very insightful information about the azure service and can pin point about the potential issue which can affect your app overall.
- Metrics and Diagnostics:- Azure Monitor enables core monitoring for Azure services by allowing the collection, aggregation, and visualization of metrics, activity logs, and diagnostic logs. The ability to view metrics and diagnostics information is critical to troubleshoot performance issues and stay notified when something goes wrong.
- Azure Advisor:- When it comes to recommendations on best practices, Azure Advisor is the thing one can rely on. Azure advisor keeps an eye on potential performance, cost, high availability, or security issues within your resources. Advisor makes personalized recommendations based on resource configuration and telemetry.
- Infrastructure Monitoring:- When designing a monitoring strategy one can take reference of below architecture. Here its important to include every component in application chain so that one can correlate events across services and resources. For services that support Azure Monitor, these can be easily configured to send their data to a Log Analytics workspace. Virtual machines can have an agent installed to send data to Log Analytics. You can submit custom data to Log Analytics through the Log Analytics API. The following diagram shows how Log Analytics acts as a central hub for monitoring data. Log Analytics receives monitoring data from your Azure resources and makes it available to consumers for analysis or visualization. Log Analytics allows you to create queries and interact with other systems based on those queries. The most common example is an alert.
- Application Monitoring:- When it comes to Application monitoring, Application insights provides telemetry collection, query and visualization capabilities. You just need to install the instrumentation package into your application and that’s it, it will start showing insights for your app in azure. Application insights are cross platform hence it can be attached .Net, NodeJS or Java.
A good monitoring strategy across multiple layers of an architecture, help you understand the detailed operation of the different components of your application. It increases your uptime by proactively notifying you of critical issues, so that you can resolve them before they become problems, and allows you to correlate logs and telemetry across systems to uncover issues. I hope you would have liked this discussion. Thanks for joining me.
Thanks,
Rahul Sahay
Happy Coding
