3.5.3. š” First Principle: Azure Monitor
First Principle: Azure Monitor is a comprehensive platform for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your cloud and on-premises environments. Its core purpose is to provide end-to-end visibility into your applications and infrastructure, enabling you to understand performance and proactively identify issues.
What It Is: The central, unified monitoring service in Azure.
Key Capabilities:
- Collects Data: Gathers two main types of data:
- Metrics: Numerical values that describe some aspect of a system at a point in time (e.g., CPU percentage, request count). They are lightweight and good for near real-time alerting.
- Logs: Contains different kinds of data organized into records with different sets of properties. Events and traces are stored as logs along with performance data.
- Analyzes Data:
- Log Analytics: A tool in the Azure portal to query and analyze log data using the powerful Kusto Query Language (KQL).
- Application Insights: A feature of Azure Monitor that provides deep application performance monitoring (APM) for developers.
- Responds to Data:
- Alerts: Proactively notify you or trigger automated actions when specific conditions are found in your monitoring data.
Scenario: A DevOps team needs to monitor the performance of their web application. They want to track the average response time, see the number of failed requests, and be alerted if the CPU usage on their servers goes above 80%.
Reflection Question: How does Azure Monitor provide a comprehensive solution for this team's monitoring needs, covering both application performance and infrastructure health?
š” Tip: Azure Monitor is the umbrella service for all monitoring in Azure. Application Insights and Log Analytics are key features within Azure Monitor.