Azure Monitor is a powerful tool in the Microsoft Azure suite, providing full observability into your applications, infrastructure, and network. It enables DevOps teams to understand the performance and overall health of their applications, diagnose issues, and optimize their resource utilization. Microsoft offers this service as an integral part of their cloud-based DevOps solution. Azure Monitor supports two types of data, metrics and logs, that explain what is happening in your environment as well as the resources that are consuming it.
Key Steps To Integrate and Configure Azure Monitor
The process of integrating and configuring Azure Monitor for your applications involves these key steps:
- Enable Azure Monitor:
Navigate to the “Monitoring” blade in the Azure portal, then to the “Diagnostic settings” section. Here you can select the resources for which you want to enable monitoring.
- Configure Metrics and Logs:
Azure Monitor works with two types of data – Metrics and Logs.
Metrics are numerical values that describe some aspect of a system at a particular point in time. They are lightweight and capable of supporting near real-time scenarios.
Logs contain time-stamped information about changes to a system’s state and are useful for more complex analysis. They contain rich, detailed information that includes system information and user behaviour.
You can configure which performance metrics or logs you wish to collect, and specify a retention period for each.
- Set up alerts and notifications:
In Azure Monitor, you can specify conditions based on your collected data, and set up alerts to notify the relevant stakeholder when these conditions are met.
- Visualize your data:
Azure Monitor includes several visualization options, like dashboards, views, charts, and maps. Use Azure Monitor Logs for complex analysis across data from different sources.
Collecting Metrics
Here is an example of how you can collect metrics for a virtual machine using PowerShell commands:
# Provide your subscription
Select-AzSubscription -Subscription "enter your subscription name here"
# Prepare the virtual machine
$vm = Get-AzVM -ResourceGroupName "MyResourceGroup" -Name "MyVM"
# Collect the metrics
$metrics = Get-AzMetric -ResourceId $vm.Id -MetricNames "Percentage CPU","Network In","Disk Read Bytes","Disk Write Bytes"
Collecting Logs
For collecting logs you need to enable the collection of platform logs and metrics at the subscription level and route them to one or more destinations. Here is an example of how you can do that using Azure CLI:
# Sign in to your account
az login
# Enable collection of platform logs and metrics
az monitor diagnostic-settings create --name mylogs --resource-id /subscriptions/abc123efg456/resourcegroups/myresourcegroup/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/myVM --workspace /subscriptions/abc123efg456/resourcegroups/myresourcegroup/providers/microsoft.operationalinsights/workspaces/myworkspace
Maintaining a robust and responsive monitoring system like Azure Monitor as a part of your DevOps practices ensures more stability and speed in delivering applications. It empowers developers to stay proactive in understanding and diagnosing issues, maintaining system health, and optimizing resource usage. It not only boosts performance but also leads to considerable cost savings in the long run.
Conclusion
To conclude, Azure Monitor is an efficient and potent tool for maintaining application health as you set up and manage your DevOps practices on Azure for meeting the criteria of AZ-400 designing and implementing Microsoft DevOps solutions.
Practice Test
True/False: Azure Monitor collects and aggregates data from various sources into a common data platform where it can be used for analysis, visualization, and alerting.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: Azure Monitor indeed collects and correlates data from various sources such as applications, operating systems, and Azure resources into a common data platform.
Which of the following are part of Azure Monitor’s data platform? Choose
- a) Azure portal
- b) Log Analytics
- c) Powe BI
- d) Application Insights
Answer: b) Log Analytics, d) Application Insights
Explanation: Azure Monitor stores log data in Log Analytics and application telemetry in Application Insights.
True/False: Azure Monitor can only monitor resources and services within Azure.
- True
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: Azure Monitor can monitor resources and services both within Azure as well as on-premises or in other clouds.
What are metrics in Azure Monitor?
- a) Information sent from applications
- b) Performance data from Azure infrastructure
- c) Data from Azure APIs
- d) Billing information from Azure
Answer: b) Performance data from Azure infrastructure
Explanation: The metrics in Azure Monitor are numerical values that describe some aspect of a system at a particular point in time.
True/False: Azure Monitor cannot be used to track costs and usage across Azure resources.
- True
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: Azure Monitor includes Azure Cost Management, which allows tracking of usage and costs across Azure resources.
Which of the following can Azure Monitor monitor? (Choose 3)
- a) Application performance
- b) Infrastructure performance
- c) Local machine performance
- d) Application usage
Answer: a) Application performance, b) Infrastructure performance, d) Application usage
Explanation: Azure Monitor can monitor performance and usage of applications, infrastructure, and network, both on Azure and on-premise.
When creating an alert rule in Azure Monitor, what must you specify?
- a) An alert name only
- b) A target resource, condition, and action
- c) A target subscription, condition, and action
- d) An alert name and action only
Answer: b) A target resource, condition, and action
Explanation: An alert rule in Azure Monitor requires you to specify a target resource, a condition that will trigger the alert and an action to take when the condition is met.
True/False: Azure Monitor integrates with Azure DevOps to provide telemetry and diagnostics data for development and deployment.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: Azure Monitor indeed integrates with Azure DevOps to provide insights into your applications and infrastructure, helping you continuously improve your applications and processes.
What is Application Insights?
- a) A feature to monitor Azure resources only
- b) An extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service
- c) A feature to visualize data
- d) A feature to monitor infrastructure health
Answer: b) An extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service
Explanation: Application Insights is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service that can be used to monitor live applications, detect issues, and guide optimization efforts.
True/False: Azure Monitor can only analyze real-time data.
- True
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: Azure Monitor can analyze both real-time and historical data, helping to proactively find issues and tailor solutions.
Interview Questions
What is Azure Monitor used for?
Azure Monitor is used for full-stack monitoring of applications and infrastructure, collecting and analyzing performance and health data to help you improve performance and availability.
What kind of data does Azure Monitor collect?
Azure Monitor collects two types of data – Metrics (numerical values that describe some aspect of a system at a particular point in time) and Logs (events recorded by the application, operating system, or Azure resources that you interact with).
Can Azure Monitor be integrated with third-party solutions and services?
Yes, Azure Monitor can be integrated with popular DevOps, issue management, ITSM, and SIEM tools using built-in connectors, making it a versatile tool for various scenarios.
How can you configure Azure Monitor to send alerts?
You can configure Azure Monitor to send alerts by defining alert conditions based on your metrics or log data. When these conditions are met, Azure Monitor will send an automated notification.
What are Azure Monitor Workbooks?
Azure Monitor Workbooks provide a flexible, interactive data analysis and visualization tool. They allow you to tap into multiple data sources from across Azure, and then combine them into unified interactive experiences.
How can Azure Monitor help with troubleshooting in AZ-400 dev ops solutions?
Azure Monitor provides detailed failure diagnostics including debugging snapshots and application exceptions which help you to troubleshoot failures faster. It also gives access to server metrics and logs for a more complete picture.
What is Application Insights in relation to Azure Monitor?
Application Insights is a feature of Azure Monitor specifically for application performance management (APM). It helps you detect and diagnose issues and understand what users do with your app.
How can you monitor your live application’s performance with Azure Monitor?
You can use Application Insights in Azure Monitor to monitor your live application. It will automatically collect data on performance, usage, and reliability, and let you view real-time telemetry data and analyze usage patterns.
Can alerts from Azure Monitor be delivered to third-party services?
Yes, Azure Monitor’s alerts can be configured to be sent to email addresses, pushed to Azure mobile application, called with webhooks (HTTP/S endpoints), or integrated into third-party services like PagerDuty or ServiceNow.
Are logs and metrics kept forever in Azure Monitor?
No, data retention in Azure Monitor varies by type of data and is subject to specific retention policies, with logs kept for a specific amount of days and metrics retained for a defined period. The retention period can also be extended by exporting the data.
Can Azure Monitor be used to monitor containers?
Yes, Azure Monitor can be used to monitor containers. Azure Monitor for containers gives you performance visibility by collecting memory and processor metrics from controllers, nodes, and containers via the Kubernetes metrics API.
Can Azure Monitor collect data from on-premises machines?
Yes, Azure Monitor can collect data from on-premises machines. Using Log Analytics agent, you can collect telemetry data, events, and performance data from Windows and Linux computers located in your on-premises environment.
How is Azure Monitor different from Azure Service Health?
Azure Service Health provides information about disruptions in the Azure service, while Azure Monitor helps you to track performance, identify trends, and detect anomalies of your applications and infrastructure.
What is a metric namespace in Azure Monitor?
A metric namespace is a group of metrics that provide insights into the specific aspect of an Azure service or third-party/resource logs service, making it easier to find and view related metrics.
Is it possible to create custom dashboards in Azure Monitor?
Yes, it’s possible. Azure Monitor allows the creation of custom dashboards providing customizable and flexible visualization tool that converts your log and metrics data into insights. It allows charts, graphs, and other forms of data visualizations.
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