Monitoring your cloud infrastructure on Microsoft Azure is crucial for maintaining its optimal functioning. By constantly monitoring and analyzing the performance of your Azure resources, including virtual machines, databases, and applications, you can proactively address any potential issues before they disrupt your business operations. However, with a multitude of options to choose from, selecting the most suitable Azure monitoring software can be a challenging endeavor.

In this blog, we will discuss the key aspects you need to consider when selecting the right Azure monitoring software for your business.

What is Azure Monitoring?

Azure monitoring is a crucial process that involves closely monitoring and analyzing the availability and performance of your cloud infrastructure on Azure. By constantly observing and analyzing the performance of various Azure resources, including virtual machines, databases, and applications, you can gain valuable, real-time insights. This allows you to proactively address any potential issues and prevent disruptions to your operations.

Why Is Azure Monitoring Important?

With the rise in demand for cloud computing, businesses have become increasingly dependent on their cloud-based applications and services. Any interruptions or issues with performance can have a significant impact on operations and revenue.

While Azure is a popular choice due to its impressive features, such as high availability, scalability, reliability, and ease of use, it is essential to closely monitor your Azure cloud environment. This is particularly important if your organization has critical applications that require constant monitoring. In such cases, Azure cloud monitoring is crucial to maintaining the uninterrupted availability and optimal performance of your Azure cloud infrastructure, ultimately helping you ensure the smooth functioning of your business applications in real time.

What Are the Core Aspects of Azure Monitoring?

A robust Azure monitoring solution must offer complete visibility into the performance of your Azure cloud environment, allowing you to easily monitor your cloud infrastructure, services, and applications — all from one central location. When selecting the right Azure monitoring software, it is important to consider the following core aspects based on your specific business application needs:

Compute

The monitoring of your Azure infrastructure's compute instances plays a crucial role in maintaining the efficiency, accessibility, and cost-effectiveness of your cloud resources. Because the cloud landscape is constantly evolving, it is vital to continuously monitor the usage and performance of the compute services that support your applications. This allows you to identify any issues or obstacles within your infrastructure and proactively address them to prevent performance interruptions and optimize resource allocation.

A good Azure monitoring tool should efficiently monitor and assess the operational efficiency of your Azure compute services. It should identify any unused or idle resources to reduce costs and improve overall productivity. This tool should also provide valuable insights into the performance and usage of the applications utilizing your compute services, enabling you to make informed decisions and improve your overall cloud strategy.

By closely monitoring the performance and resource utilization of compute services such as Azure App Service, Functions, Virtual Machines, and Virtual Machine Scale Sets, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of how your Azure compute instances are performing and make informed choices to optimize your cloud approach.

Databases

Maintaining the peak performance, accessibility, and security of your Azure databases is just as imperative as monitoring your compute services. As the reliance on cloud databases continues to increase, it is essential to regularly monitor them to ensure smooth database functioning. Identifying potential database issues early on and promptly addressing them are essential to preventing performance interruptions or downtime, ultimately guaranteeing the uninterrupted, seamless operation of your business applications.

A robust Azure monitoring solution should simplify the monitoring process for various Azure database services and help ensure the optimal performance of database instances. It should keep track of important metrics, such as CPU usage, storage capacity, and database connectivity, to facilitate efficient operations and provide valuable insights into usage patterns. This allows for better resource allocation and cost optimization.

Additionally, an Azure monitoring solution should offer query-level insights and anomaly detection for Azure databases. With comprehensive monitoring support for a wide range of database services, such as SQL databases, elastic pools, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, and Azure Cache for Redis, you can ensure the seamless performance and high availability of Azure database services with ease.

Containers

As the trend of implementing containerization and microservices architectures gains momentum across diverse enterprises, the monitoring of container services has emerged as a critical element. In a decentralized environment, it is imperative to closely monitor the performance of Azure container services to ensure efficient container orchestration and the seamless deployment of applications.

Providing comprehensive monitoring capabilities for your containerized applications and helping you ensure optimal performance and availability should be top priorities of Azure monitoring software. Such software should offer valuable insights into the health and performance of your Azure container services, such as Docker and Kubernetes, by optimizing resource usage and detecting potential bottlenecks.

This tool should also promptly notify you of any performance concerns or downtime, allowing you to maintain reliability, scalability, and availability within your business infrastructure. By monitoring container instances and registries alongside the Kubernetes service, you can have complete control over the performance of your containerized architecture.

Storage

Enterprises must effectively handle and analyze vast quantities of data throughout their expansive systems on a consistent basis. As technology continues to advance, and the amount of data stored in the cloud expands exponentially, it becomes imperative to closely oversee Azure storage services. This is particularly crucial for companies that heavily rely on these systems to store and retrieve essential data for their day-to-day functioning because it ensures the prevention of potential complications and preserves the confidentiality and reliability of their valuable information.

The ideal Azure monitoring solution should offer advanced features to track the real-time statuses and functionality of Azure storage services. It should provide a comprehensive view of the performance of storage elements like blobs, files, tables, and queues, including insights into resource allocation and usage trends. This enables the identification of intricate bottlenecks and the prevention of data loss, downtime, and expensive disruptions.

The solution must also be capable of monitoring both Standard and Premium Azure storage accounts as well as Storage Sync Services to help ensure the uninterrupted availability and swift synchronization of storage resources. This aids in maintaining data security, improving efficiency, and avoiding unnecessary expenses related to storage services.

Network management and content delivery

Ensuring the smooth functioning of your application transactions on the Azure platform requires the efficient management of your network workflows. This entails closely monitoring the communication, traffic routing, and data flows among different elements of your cloud applications. Any disruptions or glitches in these operations can result in downtime, slow response times, and, ultimately, a negative impact on the user experience. Additionally, keeping a close eye on your CDN resources is vital as they play a crucial role in delivering content effectively, depending on your applications' workloads.

Effective monitoring and analysis of the performance of your networking services are essential for a good Azure monitoring tool. It should track critical components such as communication, traffic routing, load balancing, messaging queues, and content delivery. It should have the ability to proactively identify potential issues and offer optimization suggestions to ensure the smooth functioning of your application deployments.

Moreover, it should have extensive support for a diverse range of networking and content delivery services, such as connections, DNS, Network Watcher, public IP addresses, Traffic Manager, Load Balancer, Service Bus, and Front Door, making it easier to manage all your Azure network workflows.

Network infrastructure

It is imperative to closely monitor your network infrastructure on the Azure platform in order to maintain the seamless operation of all your application transactions. This infrastructure is responsible for routing traffic and controlling the movement of data between the various components of applications. Any interruptions or malfunctions in these services can lead to downtime, sluggish response rates, and, ultimately, a detrimental effect on user satisfaction.

A reliable Azure monitoring solution must effectively track the performance of network infrastructure services, such as Application Gateway, ExpressRoute, Firewall, network interfaces, Virtual Network, and virtual network gateways. It should help you monitor important performance indicators, detect potential issues in advance, optimize performance, and ensure the high availability of application deployments. These capabilities can aid you in ensuring a dependable, efficient infrastructure; meeting service-level agreements; and delivering a smooth experience for end users.

Billing

Organizations often struggle to effectively manage their usage and expenses on Azure due to its wide range of services and functions. This can lead to overspending on unnecessary services or underestimating usage, resulting in costly bills. To optimize their investments and avoid any financial setbacks, it is crucial for businesses to closely monitor their Azure usage and expenses.

A reliable Azure monitoring solution must offer comprehensive support for monitoring Azure billing, empowering enterprises to efficiently strategize their cloud infrastructure budgets. This entails identifying and streamlining areas of inefficiency to minimize expenses. By regularly monitoring Azure billing, enterprises can gain greater oversight of their expenditures and make well-informed choices regarding their cloud consumption, leading to significant cost reductions and enhanced financial management.

Get Started with Azure Cloud Monitoring Now

A reliable Azure monitoring solution should assist you in the smooth migration of your infrastructure resources to your Azure cloud infrastructure and should ensure they remain operational throughout the entire migration process.

Applications Manager provides comprehensive Azure monitoring, helping guarantee the uninterrupted functioning of your services and the effective performance of your applications on Azure. With advanced alerting and reporting features, you can proactively address and resolve any performance concerns before they impact your clients. If you haven't explored Applications Manager yet, take advantage of a free, 30-day trial and start monitoring your Azure infrastructure and workloads — alongside your other critical components — right away.