Application and infrastructure monitoring is usually a second thought for most organizations when embarking on architecting and building solutions for their businesses.  What should we expect and why should we prioritize monitoring for our next project?

Our monitoring solution should be centralized and capable of monitoring many applications and the infrastructure supporting them.   We should expect the ability to receive alerts, reports or view dashboards to visualize current health and status.  Monitoring helps ensure the health and performance of our applications and services.  We can use monitoring to improve user experiences by being proactive in issue resolution and improving the overall efficiency of our services and/or applications

We are fortunate to be able to provide centralized monitoring solutions for both applications and infrastructure in the Azure ecosystem. Below are some of the Azure services that we can use to help build your Centralize Azure Monitoring Solution.

Azure Monitor is a centralized and fully managed service for monitoring applications and infrastructure being hosted on the platform.  We can view performance data via metrics, receive notifications via alerts, and analyze both health and performance via dashboards.

Application Insights provide real-time analytics into applications giving insight into performance, usage and patterns

Azure Log Analytics service will analyze, collect and build insights into application log data across various services.

Azure Network Watcher is used to monitor and troubleshoot network issues with your Azure infrastructure.

Azure Advisor is used to provide businesses with Azure recommendations allowing them to align with best practices.  Recommendations may include security, performance, optimizations, and high availability topics.

Azure Status is a status dashboard used to show real-time information about Azure services and specific Azure regions.

Azure Services Health will notify your business about Azure service incidences and planned maintenance.

Azure monitoring solutions help businesses gain valuable insight into their applications and infrastructure allowing them to be proactive in their troubleshooting and support.  Your business can provide continuous maintenance in efforts to provide services and applications with high availability, scalability and optimal performance.