A significant put possibly less exciting update to Azure over the past few months has been the revamp and update of Azure Monitor (AzMon). In my opinion, this is a resource that should be included in your design for all deployments. It is now a comprehensive solution for collecting, analysing, and acting on your telemetry from Azure as well as on-premises environments.
The below graphic gives an overview of AzMon and it’s three key areas. Left-to-right, you start with the six possible data ingestion sources for telemetry data. As you can see, everything from application to infrastructure is supported. The two key forms of data used is next, Metrics and Logs. The final area, highlights the processing functions available.
AzMon collects the following data for processing:
- Application monitoring data: Data about the performance and functionality of the code you have written, regardless of its platform.
- Guest OS monitoring data: Data about the operating system on which your application is running. This could be running in Azure, another cloud, or on-premises.
- Azure resource monitoring data: Data about the operation of an Azure resource.
- Azure subscription monitoring data: Data about the operation and management of an Azure subscription, as well as data about the health and operation of Azure itself.
- Azure tenant monitoring data: Data about the operation of tenant-level Azure services, such as Azure Active Directory.
As mentioned previously, the data slots neatly into two categories:
- Metrics – You can use Metrics Explorer to view resource performance among other things over periods of time. These can be presented immediately within the portal or additional dashboards can be created to visualise.
- Logs – Using Log Analytics helps to quickly retrieve, consolidate, and analyse the collected log data. This can be then be re-used in visualisations as well as alerting.
The Docs site for AzMon is fantastic. It is filled with guidance on setup as well as tutorials relating to common scenarios, rather than regurgitate, below are my personal picks:
Respond to events using alerts
Also hugely important is the level of integration with other services that AzMon offers, take a look here for the currently supported list.
wedoAzure 
Hi Joe,
Nice overview of AzMon. It really is a powerful tool, more so when you extend it to those “Custom Sources” noted in the architecture diagram. These can include important tiers in your stack integrated with Azure, like raw Kubernetes, Redis cache, MySQL dbs, or Tomcat/IIS servers. AzMon now also supports the observation of these data sources via Telegraf and Blue Medora–an agentless SaaS integration option. Check it out!
cheers, -Aaron
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