2.1.4.1. Design for Azure Monitor

First Principle: Azure Monitor is the unified observability platform for Azure and hybrid environments, providing comprehensive monitoring, diagnostics, and actionable insights. Its core purpose is to centralize telemetry data (metrics and logs), enabling organizations to collect, analyze, and act on this data to ensure end-to-end visibility and proactive operational management.

What It Is: Azure Monitor is a unified monitoring solution that helps you understand how your applications and other resources are performing and proactively identifies problems.

Azure Monitor Architecture:
  • Data Sources: Telemetry originates from Azure resources (VMs, databases, containers), applications (via SDKs), operating systems, and custom sources.
  • Data Platform: Ingests and stores metrics (numerical, near real-time) and logs (structured/unstructured, detailed events). Metrics are optimized for fast querying; logs are stored in Log Analytics for deep analysis with KQL.
  • Insights: Pre-built solutions like VM Insights and Container Insights deliver tailored monitoring and recommendations for specific workloads.
  • Visualization: Data is visualized through Azure dashboards, Workbooks (customizable reports), and Power BI integration.
  • Respond: Automated responses are enabled via alerts, autoscale, and integrations with ITSM tools or webhooks.
Designing Data Collection Strategies:
  • Metrics: Capture real-time performance and health (e.g., CPU, memory). Ideal for dashboards and threshold-based alerts.
  • Logs: Store detailed diagnostics, security, and audit data for root cause analysis and compliance.
  • Diagnostic Settings: Configure resources to send logs/metrics to Log Analytics (for querying/alerting), Storage Accounts (for retention), or Event Hubs (for streaming).
Alerting and Visualization:
  • Alert Rules: Use metric alerts for immediate threshold breaches (e.g., CPU > 80%) and log query alerts for complex patterns (e.g., failed logins from Azure AD activity logs).
  • Action Groups: Define notification/automation targets (email, SMS, Azure Functions, Logic Apps) for rapid response.
  • Visualization: Build dashboards and Workbooks for health and trend analysis, supporting proactive operations.

Scenario: You are designing the monitoring solution for a new enterprise application. This involves collecting performance data from Virtual Machines and Azure SQL Databases, aggregating all application logs into a central repository, and setting up alerts for critical events like high CPU usage or application errors.

Reflection Question: How does designing for Azure Monitor, integrating its data collection strategies (metrics, logs via diagnostic settings) with alerting and visualization capabilities, fundamentally ensure end-to-end visibility and proactive operational management for your Azure applications and infrastructure?