A large percentage of enterprises are redefining their businesses around hybrid cloud ecosystems. The benefits include increased scalability and flexibility, improved collaboration, and cost efficiency.
Microsoft Azure, one of the leading cloud computing platforms with a 23% market share in 2023, plays a key role in enabling hybrid cloud environments for organizations. Azure provides a wide range of cloud services, including computing, storage, networking, and analytics, that cater to various business needs. It enables organizations to build, deploy, and manage applications and services, from simple websites to complex enterprise software.
Since Azure is designed with a hybrid-first approach, it’s easy to integrate on-premises infrastructure and applications with Azure services. This enables organizations to leverage their existing investments while extending their capabilities to the cloud.
Why use an Azure monitoring tool?
Due to the escalating demand for Azure cloud services, organizations need Azure monitoring tools to ensure that the services they use perform optimally. Azure monitoring empowers organizations to gain deep visibility into their Azure cloud environments by collecting and aggregating various metrics and converting them into meaningful, easy-to-understand information. By employing these tools, organizations can get insights on various KPIs, including resource usage, network stats, and other service-specific metrics, identify and resolve performance issues, and ensure 24/7 uptime and optimal performance of their services.
Let’s take a look at the ten best practices in Azure monitoring. With these, you should be able to leverage Azure monitoring tools to increase operational efficiency while optimizing resource usage.
1. Establish proper monitoring objectives
Its important to outline your enterprise’s KPIs before exploring Azure monitoring. Consult stakeholders from across the business when creating monitoring objectives. For example, your accounting department may place more emphasis on cost monitoring, while your development team seeks to improve application response times. By establishing proper monitoring objectives from across the business, you can ensure that your Azure monitoring efforts are targeted, efficient, and aligned with the goals of your organization.
2. Construct performance baselines and guidelines to reduce workload
Establishing performance benchmarks and policies can help minimize pointless labor, maximize the use of available resources, and guarantee effective monitoring procedures. Baselines for key performance metrics serve as reference points for detecting anomalies and abnormal characteristics and provide insights into resource allocation and utilization patterns in your Azure environment.
3. Enable monitoring for all critical applications
To ensure a smooth experience for users accessing your services, it is important to track the health and performance of your business applications running on Azure. Enabling deep APM will help you visualize every transaction and the dependencies between various components. You can keep a close watch on your application’s performance metrics, such as response time, throughput, error rates, and resource utilization, identify bugs in the application code that are slowing down your application, and then take steps to improve them.
4. Monitor your entire infrastructure
Along with application monitoring, you should also set up monitoring of your hybrid cloud infrastructure, including Azure services and your on-premises systems such as servers, databases, and queues. This will complement your application monitoring and help you detect failures or performance slowdowns regardless of where they occur.
5. Implement monitoring in phases
Begin with basic monitoring. Over time, expand your monitoring to include health indicators, insights, and proactive alerting. Keep improving based on what you learn. It is useful to take it step by step, as a phased rollout helps to mature monitoring capabilities gradually.
6. Set up actionable alerts
Actionable alerts ensure timely detection and resolution of issues, which helps minimize downtime and maintain the reliability and performance of your cloud services and the applications dependent on them. These alerts facilitate a feedback loop for continuous improvement in your monitoring and incident management processes.
7. Regularly review and optimize your configurations
Perform continuous reviews and optimize your monitoring configurations to adapt to changing business needs and evolving Azure environments. Regularly assess monitoring data and refine alerting thresholds to ensure that your monitoring strategy remains effective, efficient, and aligned with your requirements.
8. Maintain backups
Maintaining backups guarantees data resilience against various forms of data loss, including accidental deletion, data corruption, and ransomware attacks, and speeds up disaster recovery. Properly monitoring the backup data is equally important to detect backup failures, performance issues, or compliance violations, and take prompt corrective actions.
9. Documentation and training
Documenting your monitoring setup and providing proper training for your team will ensure that everyone understands the monitoring processes and tools in place. You can schedule regular workshops or knowledge-sharing sessions to keep your team updated on new features and best practices in Azure monitoring.
10. Keep an eye on your Azure costs
Cost management practices help optimize monitoring expenses and maximize the value of monitoring investments. By actively monitoring your Azure service costs, you can make informed decisions, optimize your cloud spending, and ensure spending stays within your budget. This translates to cost efficiency and greater control over your cloud resources.
The case for third-party Azure monitoring solutions
Azure provides a variety of native monitoring tools, including Activity Logs, Azure Diagnostics, and Azure Alerts. There’s also Azure Monitor, a comprehensive monitoring and alerting service akin to AWS CloudWatch. However, monitoring your Azure environment with these tools might be difficult due to their complicated and overlapping features.
It may require a lot of time and effort to collect all the metrics in Azure Monitor, evaluate the results, and examine the important data. The simplest way to close the visibility gaps caused by Azure’s native monitoring capabilities is to use a third-party monitoring product like ManageEngine Applications Manager.
Azure monitoring with Applications Manager
ManageEngine Applications Manager empowers you to streamline your Azure monitoring experience. Gain a unified view of the health of your Azure services, including compute, databases, container services, storage, analytics, and more.
Currently, you can monitor 41 different Azure services with Applications Manager.
With Applications Manager, auto-discover Azure services to start monitoring them right away. This allows for a more comprehensive and accurate monitoring of the entire infrastructure, eliminating the need for manual configuration and monitoring of individual resources, especially as you scale up your Azure usage.
Applications Manager helps you optimize your Azure resources for peak performance and cost-efficiency. Its advanced fault management system with root cause analysis helps diagnose the source of problems, so you can quickly resolve bottlenecks, reducing the mean time to identify and mean time to repair.
And, when you configure deep APM for your Azure applications with our APM Insight module, you can continuously track key metrics of your business applications such as response time, throughput, resource utilization, error rates, exceptions, and more. With the help of code-level diagnostics, Applications Manager can help IT and DevOps teams identify performance bottlenecks and slowdowns within the application code and enable them to debug the applications effectively.
Applications Manager provides a central hub for monitoring not only your Azure services, but your entire IT infrastructure, including other cloud services like AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud, offering a holistic view of resource utilization and performance. Supporting over 150 infrastructure components, including servers, VMs, databases, application servers, web servers, middleware, and cloud platforms, it provides a panoramic view of application performance and infrastructure health.
If you haven’t tried Applications Manager yet, download a 30-day, free trial and begin monitoring Azure along with the rest of your infrastructure and applications right away.
