Azure database monitoring: How to choose the right tool in 2025

Azure cloud provides numerous services for organizations to run applications, web services, and server deployments seamlessly. This includes database deployments in the cloud. Azure databases provide a seamless integration with Azure services for cloud applications. Azure databases are reliable, scalable, and easy to manage. They enhance database availability and performance, while contributing to improved overall cloud performance.
In this blog post, we will explore why a dedicated Azure database monitoring tool is necessary, what features to prioritize, and how ManageEngine Applications Manager can meet your monitoring needs.

Why native monitoring may not be enough

Azure provides multiple built-in monitoring solutions like Azure Monitor, Azure SQL Insights, and Log Analytics to monitor and collect logs from Azure services, including databases. These tools offer deep integration with Azure services and provide basic metric collection, alerting, and visualization. 

However, multiple monitoring solutions often leave admin teams with numerous independent monitoring interfaces, leaving them to correlate interdependent cloud performance metrics manually. These solutions can also be complex to set up and may require additional components like VMs for full functionality or deep KQL expertise. Also, the native tools are primarily meant for Azure-only environments.

That's why many organizations rely on third-party solutions for enhanced visibility and control over Azure databases compared to native solutions. These tools help admin teams gain a clear overview of interrelated performance indicators, making root cause analysis and cloud performance optimization easier.

Key features to look for in an Azure database monitoring tool

Real-time monitoring

Monitoring KPIs in real time helps you ensure uninterrupted availability of your databases. You can identify performance anomalies on the go by monitoring KPIs like uptime, memory usage, disk throughput, and network traffic. These KPIs are the first line of defense that can indicate potential downtime—all before the database availability is affected. Replication Statistics - Azure cloud
Also, analyzing key performance metrics over a period of time helps you understand the performance trends and make well-informed decisions while planning load distribution and resources requirements. This helps in resource optimization and fine-tuning database efficiency.

Database-specific performance monitoring

Azure accommodates a wide range of databases like SQL server, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, Maria DB, MySQL, and many more. Each database engine has its own set of KPIs. Your Azure database monitoring software should be able to monitor the key performance metrics unique to each category, such as:

  • Replication lag and status
  • Request rate and throughput
  • Deadlocks and blocked sessions
  • Query execution time and wait time

This helps in locating performance anomalies in real time and performing effective root-cause analysis. Studying KPI trends among interdependent databases help you analyze overall database behavior, understand dependent components, and aid in improving mean time to resolve for critical issues.

Also, query monitoring is crucial to maintain database health. Unmanaged queries make the databases prone to issues like unexpected wait-time, slow query resolution, high latency, and prolonged response time. A capable database monitoring tool draws real-time insights on query KPIs such as slow or long running queries to understand issues at a granular level.

Smart anomaly detection and alerting

Ensure that your Azure database monitoring solution comes with a smart alerting system. You should be able to configure alarms based on severity, automate responsive actions and auto-assign tickets to respective DRI based on priority. Automating escalations and triggering actions on priority helps admin teams resolve issues quicker than usual. 

A smart alerting system enables proactive monitoring by detecting potential anomalies with the help of AI and ML-powered strategies. This improves response time, fastens issue resolution, and enhances user experience by aiding admins in fixing anomalies before end users face downtime or delayed services. 

Backup and recovery monitoring

Back-ups are critical when you are dealing with an array of databases that are deployed on Azure cloud. You need to monitor the health and uptime of all your Azure backup services and recovery services to ensure that they are up and running at any given time; to prevent data loss. This will help you ensure timely retention and seamless recovery in case of failures.  You should also keep tabs on recovery readiness by monitoring recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO).

Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud support

IT organizations that undergo dynamic scaling to accommodate a growing user base resort to adapting multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures. These ecosystems could be constituted by on-premise data centers and cloud services from multiple vendors like Azure and AWS. 

Your monitoring solution should be able to provide you with visibility deep into these complex layers, monitoring each component in real time. Ensure your monitoring software unifies all your cloud services, on-premise deployments, applications, and end user experience monitoring interfaces. This helps you correlate KPI trends, understand interrelated processes, analyze overall IT performance, and move proactively while optimizing your IT for better efficiency.

Cost efficiency and scalability

Choose your licensing plans with meticulous vision—monitoring software is already pricey. Make sure that you are not investing in monitoring resources you don’t need. Look for a monitoring tool that can upscale with your dynamic IT management requirements and comes with no hidden costs. 

How can Applications Manager help?

ManageEngine Applications Manager is crafted for monitoring IT ecosystems of all sizes and complexities. It offers monitoring support for over 150 technologies that include cloud applications, databases, web servers, web applications, web services, middleware, ERPs, VMs, containers and many more. With our application performance monitoring and observability tool, you can:

  • Unlock proactive monitoring with deep insights and actionable reports.
  • Extend visibility into depths of application codes and database queries.
  • Configure adaptive thresholds for dynamic baselines to control alert noise and shut away false alarms.
  • Unify infrastructure monitoring, cloud monitoring, and digital experience monitoring strategies with ITSM techniques to make IT management easier.
  • Set up integrations with communication media like Slack and ITSM solutions like ServiceNow, configure SMS and mail alerts to avoid overlooking critical escalations.
  • Leverage AI-powered alerts to stay ahead of performance anomalies and uninvited downtime.
  • Schedule maintenance downtime to ensure uninterrupted availability during peak hours.
  • Utilize forecast reports to understand resource consumption trends and predict traffic peaks; optimize load and resources accordingly.

With Applications Manager's Azure database monitoring, you can monitor:

Along with Azure Databases, Applications Manager also provides monitoring support for more than 50 Azure cloud services. Learn more.

Interested? Schedule a demo with our product experts or download a 30-day, free trial to get a hands-on experience of Applications Manager and check out how well it caters to your monitoring needs.