Azure Monitor

By Pooja | 17th July 2025

Introduction

As applications move to the cloud and become more distributed, the need for centralized observability, intelligent alerts, and performance analysis has never been greater. Microsoft’s solution to this challenge is Azure Monitor—a comprehensive monitoring platform that collects, analyzes, and acts on telemetry data from your Azure and on-premises environments.

This article explores the core elements of Azure Monitor: Metrics, Logs, Alerts, and Insights. Together, these components provide end-to-end visibility into your applications, infrastructure, and network health, helping ensure performance, reliability, and security.

What is Azure Monitor?

Azure Monitor is a full-stack observability platform within Microsoft Azure that enables you to collect and analyze data across your resources to understand their performance, availability, and usage. It supports:

Infrastructure monitoring
Application monitoring
Network performance monitoring
Custom telemetry collection
Alerting and automation

Whether you’re running virtual machines, databases, containers, or serverless functions, Azure Monitor provides a centralized, scalable platform for telemetry.

Why Azure Monitor Matters?

Benefits of Using Azure Monitor:

Proactive detection of issues
Correlated performance data across layers
Real-time alerting and automated responses
Historical analytics for trends and forecasting
Custom dashboards and visualizations
Root cause analysis through powerful querying

These capabilities help teams deliver high-performance, resilient, and cost-optimized cloud services.

Key Components of Azure Monitor

Component	Description
Metrics	Numerical values collected at regular intervals (e.g., CPU %, disk IOPS)
Logs	Structured or unstructured telemetry collected for deep diagnostics
Alerts	Notifications or automated actions based on conditions in metrics/logs
Insights	Pre-configured monitoring for specific services like VMs, AKS, App Services
Dashboards	Custom visualizations using Workbooks and Grafana
Diagnostic Settings	Controls what telemetry data is sent where
Export	Integration with Event Hub, Storage, or third-party SIEMs

Metrics in Azure Monitor

What Are Metrics?

Metrics are lightweight, near real-time data points that represent the state or performance of a system. Azure Monitor collects metrics from:

Azure resources (VMs, databases, networks)
Applications via SDKs (App Insights)
Custom metrics from APIs

Common Metrics:

CPU usage
Memory utilization
Disk reads/writes
Network in/out
Request count and latency (App Service)

Metric Characteristics:

Collected every 1 minute (or more frequently for some services)
Stored for 93 days
Highly optimized for alerting and visualization

Using Metrics:

Query using Metrics Explorer
Build dashboards in Azure Monitor Workbooks
Use auto-scale rules for VMs and App Services based on metric thresholds

Logs in Azure Monitor

What Are Logs?

Logs are rich, queryable records of events, requests, and traces that allow you to troubleshoot and analyze behaviors deeply. Azure Monitor Logs are stored in a Log Analytics workspace, which supports a powerful Kusto Query Language (KQL).

Sources of Logs:

Azure Activity Logs (control plane)
Resource Diagnostics (data plane)
Application Insights Logs (custom app telemetry)
Guest OS logs from Azure VMs (via agents)
Container logs (AKS, Docker)

Types of Logs:

Log Type	Purpose
Performance Counters	OS-level telemetry from agents
Diagnostic Logs	Resource-specific event data
Application Logs	App tracing, dependencies, exceptions
Audit Logs	Access, authorization, changes
Custom Logs	Uploaded or custom-collected logs

Log Query Example:

kql

CopyEdit

AzureActivity

| where OperationName == “Delete Virtual Machine”

| summarize Count = count() by ResourceGroup

Features:

Unlimited retention (configurable)
Powerful correlation and join queries
Integrated with Azure Sentinel, Power BI, and Logic Apps

Alerts in Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor Alerts notify you when a defined condition is met—on metrics, logs, or activity changes.

Types of Alerts:

Metric Alerts
- Triggered when a metric crosses a threshold.
- Ideal for performance conditions (e.g., CPU > 80%).
Log Alerts
- Based on query results in Log Analytics.
- Useful for custom queries, audit logs, and event traces.
Activity Log Alerts
- Monitor Azure resource changes and user actions.

Alert Components:

Scope: The resource to monitor
Condition: Query or threshold
Action Group: Defines notification channels (email, SMS, webhook, ITSM)
Severity: Levels from 0 (Critical) to 4 (Verbose)

Alert Use Cases:

Notify admins when a VM is stopped unexpectedly
Trigger auto-remediation with Logic Apps
Alert when too many login failures occur
Watch for missing data patterns

Insights in Azure Monitor

Insights are pre-configured monitoring experiences for specific Azure services, providing visualizations, dependencies, and performance recommendations.

Types of Insights:

Insight Type	Description
VM Insights	Monitor CPU, memory, disk, network; process maps
Container Insights	Monitor AKS clusters, nodes, pods, memory/cpu usage
Application Insights	End-to-end application monitoring with tracing
Storage Insights	Analyze blob/container usage and performance
SQL Insights	Query performance, deadlocks, blocking

Application Insights Key Features:

Live Metrics Stream
Smart Detection
Transaction tracing
Dependency tracking
Custom events and telemetry

These insights speed up root cause analysis and optimize performance.

Integration with Other Azure Services

Azure Monitor integrates with:

Azure Logic Apps – Automated remediation or notification
Azure Automation – Runbooks on alerts
Azure Functions – Trigger event-driven scripts
Power BI – Data visualization
Azure Sentinel – SIEM capabilities
Azure Arc – Monitor hybrid and multi-cloud systems

Also supports exporting logs to:

Event Hubs
Blob Storage
Third-party tools like Splunk, Datadog, Grafana

Use Cases

Proactive alerting when resources degrade
Security monitoring through login failures or permission changes
Application performance monitoring and user behavior analysis
Cost optimization by identifying idle resources
Compliance reporting using log history
DevOps CI/CD telemetry for pipelines and rollbacks

Security and Role-Based Access

Azure Monitor supports RBAC (Role-Based Access Control):

Role	Permissions
Monitoring Reader	View metrics, logs, dashboards
Monitoring Contributor	Create alerts and dashboards
Log Analytics Contributor	Create and modify queries

Use Diagnostic Settings to control what data is collected and who can access it.

Pricing Overview

Azure Monitor costs are based on:

Data ingestion (per GB for logs)
Data retention (per GB per month)
Alert rules and notifications
Metrics collected (most basic metrics are free)
Insights (some services include additional fees)

Best Practices

Use Log Analytics workspaces per environment (dev/test/prod)
Set up alert thresholds tailored to each service
Retain logs for compliance and audits as needed
Use Workbooks and dashboards to visualize key metrics
Integrate Application Insights into your app code
Review costs monthly and set caps or alerts
Implement action groups with redundancy (email, SMS, webhook)

Conclusion

Azure Monitor is a comprehensive observability platform that empowers cloud architects, developers, and operations teams to ensure the health, performance, and reliability of their infrastructure and applications.

With its powerful suite of tools—Metrics for real-time performance, Logs for deep diagnostics, Alerts for proactive action, and Insights for intelligent analysis—Azure Monitor provides everything needed for full visibility across your Azure estate.

In modern DevOps and hybrid environments, Azure Monitor acts as the nerve center, enabling faster incident response, better decision-making, and a more resilient cloud experience.

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