In the age of competition, you don’t really have a choice but to offer the best-performing solutions to the users. They expect faster and smoother applications to support their tasks and a greater level of security to ensure they are safe from more attacks and data leaks. Hence, you must constantly monitor your applications for availability and performance, which is easy with Azure monitoring tools. This way, you can ensure your applications and services are up and running with top-notch speed all the time and are secure by spotting issues faster and launching quick remedies early. In this article, I’ll discuss this more and then introduce you to the best Azure monitoring tools for your applications and services running on Azure.
What Is Azure?
Microsoft Azure is a leading cloud computing platform developed and operated by Microsoft. It offers software-as-a-service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). It supports multiple programming languages, frameworks, and tools provided by Microsoft and third parties. Azure is also an online portal that allows people to access and manage various cloud resources, applications, and services that store and transform your data based on your needs. In fact, it offers 200+ cloud services and products to help you design new solutions and run and scale existing ones in its public cloud. Using the Azure portal, you can access these services and resources. They are available to meet organizations’ demands from various verticals, from finance and health to eCommerce, technology, and many more. Some Azure products and services include:
Networking: Azure CDN, Azure DNS, virtual network, and Express RouteCompute services like virtual machines in Linux, Windows, etc., cloud services, service fabric for microservices, and functions to create applications.Storage: File storage, disk storage, blob storage, and queue storage.Identity: Azure Active Directory and information protectionMobile services: Mobile Engagement to collect analytics in real-time, HockeyApp, etc.Communication services: SDK to create communication appsData Management: Azure Data Lake, Data Explorer, Cosmos DB, HDInsight, etc.
And many more.
What Do You Mean by Azure Monitoring?
Azure Monitoring is the process of monitoring, collecting, aggregating, and analyzing the KPIs of different services that Microsoft Azure Cloud offers. You can monitor Azure services with the help of various Azure monitoring and troubleshooting tools available in the market, such as Microsoft Azure Monitor, Paessler PRTG, and more. This helps you ensure high performance and uptime of your Azure services and take care of their security and proper resource allocation and consumption.
Why Should You Care About Azure Monitoring?
Microsoft Azure is an advanced cloud platform offering services with flexibility, rich features, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. However, any application can be affected due to issues related to performance, availability, security, etc. As a result, you will find it challenging to manage the performance and overall health of your applications running on Azure. And if it’s not addressed, it can slow down your applications to annoy users, turn vulnerabilities into security disasters, and cause data privacy risks. All this is neither good for end-users nor businesses. This is why using Azure monitoring tools is beneficial. These tools will monitor your Azure services and collect metrics to help you analyze and spot issues to troubleshoot them quickly. Hence, you can keep your services running with optimal performance in the cloud on on-premises. In addition, it will offer plenty of other benefits like optimizing your cloud expenses by helping you allocate resources smartly, avoid over and under consumption, and eliminate ideal resources. Now, let’s discover some of the best Azure monitoring tools in the market.
ManageEngine Applications Manager
Visualize your Azure environment thoroughly, run business-critical workloads optimally, and troubleshoot performance-related issues faster with ManageEngine’s Azure monitoring tool. It helps ensure all your critical processes and services are running well by collecting, working, and analyzing the telemetry from on-premises and cloud environments. With this tool, you will get deep visibility into all your infrastructure and applications to identify issues and resolve them to maintain consistent performance. It utilizes Azure APIs to integrate with Azure to collect data, aggregate metrics, and show everything on the dashboard. This will enable you to monitor performance metrics without installing collectors or agents. Furthermore, Applications Manager will help you track your Microsoft domain and dependencies and move to Azure with better confidence. You can also monitor resource usage to ensure they are not under or over-used while eliminating idle resources to save costs. Proactively monitor your Azure KPIs by collecting stats in real-time and aggregating them to perform historical analysis. You also get forecast reports with machine learning methods to predict growth and resource consumption. In addition, you can configure alerts easily, trigger them in real-time when an issue arises, and receive them via email, Slack, or text. Applications Manager offers sophisticated root cause analysis to detect and diagnose the problems faster by automating tasks through webhooks. It integrates with ITSM tools like ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus for incident management. You can also utilize it to scale cloud resources automatically based on system load, offering you the required computation power.
Paessler PRTG
Get an all-in-one performance monitoring tool – Paessler PRTG, a cloud infrastructure that can help you monitor, optimize, and secure your Azure infrastructure. It can track Azure resources and offers prompt alerts if any performance issue or downtime occurs. This Azure monitoring tool provides an overview of Azure applications, resources, and applications. It will improve your troubleshooting capabilities and ensure higher application availability and performance. By monitoring your complete IT infrastructure, PRTG will help reduce cloud risks and configure local networks to adapt to the cloud. It also significantly reduces troubleshooting time and bypasses issues easily and quickly. It provides a concise and customizable dashboard to visualize measured application metrics and insights. PRTG will empower you with relevant load and performance data along with valuable insights from your systems and applications so you can make the right decisions. Get informed automatically by defining your threshold values and choose how to receive alerts – by push notifications, emails, and text. In addition, monitor Azure metrics in a centralized dashboard and excellent reporting features that are customizable. Moreover, PRTG can monitor your VMs to keep them running all the time with the help of sensors and displays their CPU usage and CPU credit remaining. This way, you can optimize your Azure subscription cost. You can use any of the 18 Azure sensors by AutomonX, a partner of Paessler, and connect it with your Azure environment via a REST API to collect data and metrics. Getting started with PRTG is easy within minutes and is compatible with various mobile devices. You can download its cloud-based version or Windows desktop version and use any of the 9 supported languages, including English. PRTG is free for up to 100 sensors.
Serverless360
Get an advanced cloud management solution – Serverless360 focused on Azure that comes with enterprise-level monitoring, tracking, governance, and remediation and operates your systems efficiently. Azure portal is robust and powerful to develop complex solutions capable of handling support tasks and lets you innovate by automating functional errors. Serverless360 offers sophisticated contextual visualization, can resolve issues faster, and helps you delight your customers. Get complete visibility on your Azure infrastructure using a business lens and triage incidents. You can also convert live data from Azure services into valuable insights on security, cost, and usage. In addition, it offers end-to-end tracking, controls different Azure services to drive business, and helps you resolve failures. Serverless360 provides live dashboards and aggregate error reports on KPIs and lets you see your complete Azure applications and their dependencies in interactive maps. It also enables self-healing to counteract operational failures and saves your time on complex troubleshooting. Furthermore, Serverless360 offers structured documentation on your Azure subscription, including a detailed usage report, examining expenditure trends, and automatically scanning services to assess security posture. Its desktop applications support Linux, macOS, and Windows platforms. You will get more features like granular user access, governance and auditing, different hosting options, notifications, profile monitoring, and more. It offers a FREE trial.
Microsoft Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor by none other than Microsoft is an excellent option to get complete visibility of your infrastructure, network, and applications. It allows you to collect telemetry data from your Azure infrastructure to analyze and take quick action. By proactively monitoring and identifying issues in your Azure services, you can maximize their availability and performance. You will get a centralized, scalable, and fully-managed data store optimized for cost and performance. You can also test hypotheses and discover patterns through an advanced analytics engine, built-in ML constructs, and interactive query language. Azure Monitor integrates with popular IT service management, issue management, DevOps, event management, and security information management tools. Whether your Azure services are hosted on the cloud or on-premises, you can easily monitor their usage, uptime, and performance. This tool can analyze your entire IT infrastructure, including VMs, databases, Azure Storage, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), along with the network. It can trigger a data packet capture, analyze security, control and visualize the Azure network, and diagnose routing problems. It also supports famous frameworks and languages such as Java, Node.js, .NET, and tools like Jira, Azure DevOps, PagerDuty, etc., to track requests, live metrics, events, and response times.
SolarWinds
Use Azure Performance Monitoring by SolarWinds to track and monitor your Azure services. Its Hybrid Cloud Observability offers network management and monitors all your cloud services, infrastructure, applications, databases, and networks. This tool will help you realize rapid time-to-value, speed up issue remediation, ensure greater service uptime levels, and gain agility and productivity. The SolarWinds Server and Application Manager (SAM) is a robust Azure monitoring tool that monitors your complete environment and offers insights and overviews. It’s a centralized dashboard that offers insights into the performance of your systems, infrastructure, and applications respective of where they are. You can also visualize metrics, correlate them across your environment, and configure alerts. It also offers an auto-discovery feature to ensure the monitoring includes Azure containers and cloud VMs. Furthermore, you can track the performance of your IaaS and PaaS services, Microsoft applications, services, and cloud resources with agent/agentless monitoring. You can monitor the performance of Microsoft products like Windows, SQL Server, Skype, SharePoint, IIS Server, Office 365, and more. Try it free for 30 days. Or, take the full suite of Azure performance monitoring tools starting at $1,663.
Datadog
Datadog offers monitoring for 40+ Azure services by collecting and unifying all the data streaming from complex environments via easy-to-install integrations. You can deploy this Datadog Agent on their Azure VMs directly, start collecting metrics and enjoy greater granularity. Datadog’s unique integration dashboards allow you to get a higher view into your infrastructure’s health along with deeper visibility into your individual services like Azure App Services and AKS. It enables you to track each phase of migrations to Azure by empowering you with seamless tracking of service performance side-by-side throughout the migration procedure. This way, you can meet your expected benchmarks. It supports 500+ integrations to monitor various technologies and infrastructure. IT infrastructure teams can utilize the Host map and monitor data in real-time, like network and CPU utilization across all VMs and availability zones, to view performance faster or before a migration. You will also get ML-driven features like forecasting to address application issues before they could affect customers. Datadog lets you create an adoption strategy and ensures the environment is ready for cloud migration while taking care of workloads. It provides a single source of truth to help you better plan, track migration’s progress, and spot issues when they arise. You will also get deeper visibility into your hybrid, on-prem, and multi-cloud environments. Use Datadog’s Service Map to visualize dependencies between your cloud and on-prem databases, containers, VMs, etc., and track data easily. It also automatically scales your AKS, Azure Functions, and Azure App Services to support higher traffic and increasing demand. Datadog gives you the confidence to deploy your services and offers plenty of tools to share and review data. It also supports integrations with tools like PagerDuty, Jira, Teams, and more.
Dynatrace
Get advanced observability into your complete Azure environment with Dynatrace’s Azure monitoring. It offers AI-assisted and fully-automated observability across your systems and provides a single source of truth for entire cloud platforms to ensure the infrastructure’s health. You will get full-stack observability quickly in minutes with traces, logs, and metrics. Dynatrace will also help with auto-discovery, instant answers, and continuous dependency to automate monitoring for Azure cloud services, such as AKS, HDInsight, Database Performance, App Service, and more. Get wider visibility of hosts, orchestration and containers, VMs, events, devices, and networks with AI-based root cause detection. You can integrate this platform with Azure to monitor your Azure cloud services without requiring manual configuration. You will also get real-time observability with continuous support. Furthermore, Davis is Dynayrtace’s AI that helps continuously analyze dependencies to offer accurate root cause analysis. It enables you to resolve issues faster, capture transactions automatically across each tier, even at the code level and baseline performance, and adapt to the changes in your environment. Dynatrace is also helpful in transforming your DevOps processes with event-driven automated operations and continuous delivery, improved code quality, shortened development lifecycle, and monitoring DevOps tools. It can accelerate your cloud migrations and boost cross-team collaboration. It comes with a FREE trial.
Zabbix
Zabbix helps you monitor Azure services, infrastructure, clouds, and virtual machines. You will get vendor monitoring templates for your Azure VMs and support reading problem diagnostic data for VMs on Azure. You can access a Python script and start monitoring the health of your Azure services from Zabbix. It also integrates with Azure API for monitoring. In addition, you can request custom integration according to Zabbix best practices and your requirements.
ZenPacks
Use ZenPack to monitor your Azure subscription and stay informed of performance and uptime issues. It helps you discover issues faster and keep an eye on application service and storage service components. In addition, you get event management capability along with the option to monitor some Azure states. You can also check service impact and receive reports showing unattached VHDs.
Conclusion
Monitor your Azure applications and services with Azure monitoring tools to spot and fix issues easily. It will help you ensure they are running with optimal performance, uptime, and security. Hence, choose the best Azure monitoring tools from the above list based on your preference and business needs.
