Azure monitoring involves tracking and analyzing the health and performance of your cloud infrastructure hosted on Microsoft Azure. It involves gaining real-time insights into the performance of Azure resources, such as virtual machines, databases, and applications, enabling you to identify and resolve issues before they impact your operations. With a plethora of options available in the market, choosing the right Azure monitoring software can be a daunting task.
In this blog, we will discuss the key aspects to consider while evaluating Azure monitoring software for your business and how Applications Manager enables you to monitor your Azure infrastructure.
Need for Azure monitoring
As cloud computing continues to gain popularity, organizations heavily rely on their cloud-based applications and services. Any disruptions or performance challenges can greatly affect operations and revenue. While Azure is a top choice for its exceptional features such as high availability, scalability, reliability, and user-friendliness, monitoring your Azure cloud deployments is crucial, especially when your infrastructure has critical applications that require constant tracking. In these scenarios, Azure monitoring plays a vital role in ensuring the continuous availability and optimal performance of your Azure cloud infrastructure, and by extension, your business applications.
Key aspects of Azure monitoring with Applications Manager
Applications Manager is a unified solution for monitoring application and infrastructure performance, equipped with the ability to monitor your Azure cloud infrastructure. It grants you deep insights into your Azure cloud environment, providing you with comprehensive visibility into your cloud infrastructure, services, and applications, all from a single pane of glass. Let’s explore how Applications Manager can complement your Azure monitoring needs, categorized according to business application requirements.
Compute
Tracking the compute instances of your Azure infrastructure is essential in upholding the efficacy, accessibility, and cost-efficiency of cloud resources. Given the ever-changing nature of the cloud, it is imperative to consistently track the utilization and effectiveness of compute services responsible for hosting your application. This enables you to detect any potential problems or hindrances within your infrastructure, to take proactive steps to avoid performance disruptions, and to enhance resource management.
Applications Manager effectively tracks and evaluates the operational effectiveness of your Azure compute services, pinpointing any underutilized or idle resources to minimize expenses and enhance overall productivity. It offers valuable intelligence on the performance and utilization of applications using these compute services, empowering you to make well-informed choices and enhance your overall cloud approach.
When issues arise, such as application crashes, high CPU usage, or network connectivity problems, monitoring data provides valuable insights to help identify the root cause. By tracking the performance and resource utilization of compute services, such as App Services, Functions, Virtual Machines, and VM Scale Sets, you get comprehensive insights into how your Azure compute instances are functioning, enabling you to make informed decisions to optimize your overall cloud strategy.
Databases
Ensuring the optimal performance, accessibility, and protection of your Azure databases is just as crucial as monitoring your compute services. As dependence on cloud databases continues to grow, it is vital to consistently monitor them to guarantee smooth database operation. Detecting potential database problems early on and addressing them promptly is crucial in avoiding performance disruptions or downtime, ultimately ensuring the uninterrupted and seamless functioning of your business applications.
Applications Manager simplifies the monitoring process for various Azure database services and ensures your database instances are performing optimally. Keeping track of important metrics, such as CPU usage, storage capacity, and DB connectivity, ensures that your databases operate efficiently and provides valuable insights into usage patterns, allowing for better resource allocation and cost optimization. Additionally, it offers query-level insights and anomaly detection for Azure databases.
With Applications Manager’s comprehensive support for a wide range of services, such as SQL DBs and elastic pools, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, CosmosDB, and Redis cache, you can ensure seamless performance and high availability of your Azure database services.
Containers
As the utilization of containerization and microservices architectures continues to grow among various organizations, the monitoring of container services has become a vital component. With these services functioning in a decentralized setting, maintaining constant vigilance on the performance of Azure container services is crucial in order to facilitate seamless container orchestration and smooth deployment of applications.
With Applications Manager, you can keep a close eye on the performance of your Azure container services and quickly identify any potential bottlenecks. By optimizing resource usage and ensuring the continuous availability of applications running on containers like Docker or Kubernetes, this tool offers valuable insights into the overall health and performance of your containerized applications.
Applications Manager promptly notifies you of any performance concerns or downtime, allowing you to maintain the utmost reliability, scalability, and availability for your containerized applications within your business infrastructure. Supported container services in Applications Manager include monitoring of both container instances and registries as well as Kubernetes services.
Storage
Large-scale corporate systems deal with managing and processing massive amounts of data on a regular basis. With the continuous evolution of technology and the ever-growing volume of cloud-stored information, it is crucial to closely monitor Azure storage services in order to maintain optimal functionality and performance. This is especially important if your business relies on these systems to store and access critical data for its operations to avoid potential issues and maintain the integrity and security of your valuable data.
By utilizing Applications Manager’s advanced Azure monitoring capabilities, you can easily monitor the status and functionality of your Azure storage services in real time. Gain deep insights into the performance of your storage components, such as blobs, files, tables, or queues, along with their corresponding resource allocation and usage trends, enabling you to detect complex bottlenecks and prevent potential data loss, downtime, and costly disruptions.
Applications Manager can monitor your Azure storage accounts (Standard and Premium) as well as Storage Sync services, ensuring high availability and quick synchronization of your storage resources. This way, you can keep your data secure, increase efficiency, and avoid unnecessary expenses associated with your storage services.
Network management and content delivery
Effective management of your network workflow is essential in guaranteeing the seamless operation of your application transactions on the Azure platform. This involves monitoring the communication, traffic routing, and data flow between various components of your cloud application. Any interruptions or malfunctions in these processes can lead to downtime, sluggish response rates, and, ultimately, a detrimental effect on user satisfaction. Furthermore, it is crucial to monitor your CDN resources, as they play a significant role in effective content delivery mechanisms for your applications based on their workload.
Applications Manager streamlines monitoring the performance of your networking services, such as communication, traffic routing, load balancing, messaging queues, and content delivery. It achieves this by continuously tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), proactively detecting any potential issues, and allowing you to optimize performance to ensure the availability of your application deployments. This not only helps you maintain a reliable and efficient infrastructure, but it also helps you meet service level agreements and deliver a seamless experience for end users.
Applications Manager is a comprehensive solution for managing your Azure network workflows that offers support for a wide range of network management and content delivery services, including Connections, DNS (both public and private), Network Watcher (for monitoring connections), Public IP Addresses, Traffic Manager, Load Balancer, Service Bus, and Front Door.
Network Infrastructure
Monitoring networking infrastructure is crucial for ensuring the smooth functioning of all the application transactions hosted on the Azure platform and is responsible for routing traffic and managing the flow of data between different components of an application. Any issues or disruptions in these services can result in downtime, slow response times, and ultimately, a negative impact on the user experience.
Applications Manager makes it easy for you to track the performance of your network infrastructure services, such as Application Gateway, Express Route, Firewall, Network Interfaces, Virtual Networks, and Virtual Network Gateways. It keeps track of KPIs and proactively identifies any potential issues, enabling you to optimize performance and ensure high availability of your application deployments. This not only helps in maintaining a reliable and efficient infrastructure but also helps in meeting service level agreements and providing a seamless experience to end users.
Billing
Microsoft Azure provides a variety of services and capabilities, making it difficult for organizations to efficiently manage their usage and costs. Without proper supervision, companies may end up overspending on non-essential services or underestimating their usage, resulting in unexpected and expensive bills. Therefore, it is essential for businesses to closely monitor their Azure usage and expenses to maximize their investment and prevent any financial surprises.
With Applications Manager’s support for monitoring Azure billing, you can plan cloud infrastructure budgets by identifying areas of inefficiency and optimizing their usage to reduce costs. By regularly monitoring Azure billing, you can gain better control over your expenses and make informed decisions about your cloud usage, ultimately leading to cost savings and improved financial management.
Ensure seamless migration to Azure
If you’re new to Azure and are worried about the migration hassles your infrastructure resources have to go through, Applications Manager has you covered. With comprehensive monitoring support for over 150 applications—ranging from servers, databases, virtual servers, containers, etc.—Applications Manager facilitates you in providing a seamless migration of your infrastructure resources into your Azure cloud infrastructure and ensures it’s up and running at all times, from start to finish of your migration process.
Begin monitoring your Azure cloud infrastructure with Applications Manager
Applications Manager provides comprehensive support for monitoring your Azure cloud infrastructure, ensuring the continuous operation and optimal performance of your Azure-hosted services. With intuitive setup and advanced alerting and reporting capabilities, you can troubleshoot and resolve performance issues before they affect business customers.
If you’re yet to discover the capabilities of Applications Manager, now is the perfect time. With a complimentary, 30-day trial, you can begin monitoring your Azure infrastructure and workloads, along with other essential components, without any hassle.
