Monitoring is a crucial aspect of DevOps lifecycle. It provides feedback from all parts of the production environment, like application performance, user satisfaction, and overall system health. It can even span multiple departments in your organization, like operations, development, marketing, management, etc. Microsoft provides several monitoring tools like Azure Monitor and Application Insights to help users with these monitoring tasks.
Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor analyzes, visualizes, and collects telemetry data from your cloud and on-premises environments. It simplifies resource and application monitoring by delivering a unified view across all systems. Azure Monitor uses a variety of methods for data collection, like Azure Diagnostics Extension, Azure Log Analytics agent, Log files, Performance Counters, and many more.
Application Insights
Application Insights, provided by Azure, is an extensible application performance management (APM) service. It helps developers detect, triage, and diagnose issues in their web applications and services. It also helps in tracking the application usage and traffic trends.
Now, let’s dive into how to configure and integrate these tools:
- Configure Azure Monitor:
- Sign in to Azure portal.
- In the left-hand menu, select ‘Monitor’.
- In the Monitor pane, select ‘Settings’.
- In the settings pane, you’ll find several configuration options ranging from email notifications, to integrating with Event Hubs, or even exporting the telemetry data to a storage account.
- Configure Application Insights:
- In the Azure portal, select ‘Create a resource’.
- In the ‘New’ window, search for ‘Application Insights’.
- In the new panel, provide the name, subscription, resource group, and location for your Application Insights resource and select ‘Review + create’.
- After the resource is created, go to your ‘Application Insights’ resource and select ‘Configure’ on the left pane. This is where you can set up various configuration options like sampling, continuous export, IP masking, etc.
Now let’s talk about integrating these tools into your applications. For a .NET application, you’d add a package reference to Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.AspNetCore in your project. After that, you’d add services.AddApplicationInsightsTelemetry() in your ConfigureServices method and app.UseApplicationInsights() in your Configure method in your Startup.cs class file. This will start tracking requests, exceptions, dependency calls etc.
Similarly, you can integrate Azure monitor with your applications by setting up Azure Diagnostics extension. This will start pushing your operation system and environment data into Azure Monitor for analysis.
Both Azure Monitor and Application Insights provide a rich set of features for application monitoring. While Azure Monitor is more about infrastructure and platform monitoring, Application Insights provides deep insights into your application’s behavior. Both the tools have different areas of focus but they complement each other well, providing a comprehensive monitoring solution in Azure.
Comparing Azure Monitor and Application Insights
| Azure Monitor | Application Insights |
|---|---|
| Infrastructure and platform monitoring | Application behavior monitoring |
| Used for Cloud and on-premises | Recommended for Cloud |
| Provides a unified view across all systems | Provides deep insights into application |
| Telemetry data can be exported for further analysis | |
| Can integrate with Event Hubs, Log Analytics, and Storage Account | Can integrate with Log Analytics |
In conclusion, having a full suite of monitoring tools capable of providing feedback from all parts of production is critical for running modern cloud applications. Azure Monitor and Application Insights are both critical tools for achieving this goal. Understanding and using these tools effectively can greatly benefit your organization’s DevOps. Remember to always adapt the usage of these tools based on the specific requirements of your operations.
Practice Test
True or False: Azure Monitor collects data from various sources like applications, operating systems, and Azure resources.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: Azure Monitor collects different types of data, including metrics and logs, from multiple sources such as applications, the operating system, Azure resources, and Azure subscriptions and tenants.
True or False: Azure Monitor and Application Insights are both used for application monitoring, but can’t be used together.
- True
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: They can be used together. Application Insights is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for developers and can be integrated with Azure Monitor for a complete monitoring solution.
Which of the following can’t be monitored by Azure Monitor?
- a) Azure resources
- b) Azure subscriptions
- c) Third-party apps deployed on Azure
- d) External Websites not hosted on Azure
Answer: d) External Websites not hosted on Azure
Explanation: Azure Monitor only provides full observability into your applications, infrastructure, and network deployed in Azure, it doesn’t monitor external websites not hosted on Azure.
True or False: The integration of Azure Monitor and Azure DevOps provides seamless tracking of changes in Azure Pipelines.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: The integration enables users to add Observability in Azure Pipelines which allows users to track changes.
What is Azure Application Insights?
- a) A tool for monitoring applications in Azure
- b) A feature of Azure Monitor
- c) Both a and b
- d) None of the above
Answer: c) Both a and b
Explanation: Application Insights is an extensible application performance management service for developers and a feature of Azure Monitor, allowing users to monitor live applications in real time.
Which of the following does Azure Monitor help to visualize?
- a) Metrics
- b) Logs
- c) Both a and b
- d) None of the above
Answer: c) Both a and b
Explanation: Azure Monitor allows you to visualize metrics and logs, export or send telemetries to other services, and create alerts when specific conditions are found.
True or False: Application Insights can support both serverless apps and traditional applications.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: Azure Application Insights is feature-rich and extremely flexible, thereby providing support for both serverless applications and traditional applications.
What does Application Insights primarily monitor?
- a) Performance
- b) Availability
- c) Usage
- d) All of the above
Answer: d) All of the above
Explanation: Application Insights monitors your live application to provide real-time telemetry for performance, availability, and usage insights.
True or False: Azure Monitor lacks alerting capabilities.
- True
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: Azure Monitor provides multiple ways to interact with your monitoring data which includes using the web portal, Power BI, REST API, PowerShell and CLI. It also provides alerts.
Which language is used to query metrics in Azure Monitor?
- a) SQL
- b) Kusto Query Language (KQL)
- c) Python
- d) Java
Answer: b) Kusto Query Language (KQL)
Explanation: As part of its features, Azure Monitor uses a version of the Kusto Query Language, which is a simple yet powerful data query language.
Interview Questions
What is Azure Monitor used for in DevOps?
Azure Monitor is used to collect, analyze, and act on telemetry from your cloud and on-premises environments. This helps to understand the performance and usage of your applications and to diagnose issues if they arise.
What is the role of Application Insights in Azure DevOps?
Application Insights is used to monitor live applications. It provides automatic performance monitoring, diagnostic data, and usage statistics, which gives a detailed understanding of how an application is performing and being used.
How can you configure Azure Monitor?
You can configure Azure Monitor through the Azure portal, via the Monitor Blade. From here, you can create new alerts, define action groups, and set up metrics-based conditions.
Can Application Insights be integrated with Azure DevOps?
Yes, Application Insights can be integrated with Azure DevOps. This allows for richer application diagnostics and telemetry which can be useful for in-depth performance tracking and usage analysis.
How do you integrate Application Insights with Azure DevOps?
You can integrate Application Insights with Azure DevOps via the Azure portal. Add the Application Insights resource to your Azure subscription, and then add the Application Insights SDK to your code. The Application Insights data will then be available in your Azure DevOps dashboards.
What data can you collect with Application Insights?
Application Insights can collect a variety of telemetry data, including request rates, response times, failure rates, dependency rates, and exceptions. It can also collect custom metrics and events.
What are Azure Monitor Metrics?
Azure Monitor 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.
How can you view Application Insights data in Azure DevOps?
To view Application Insights data in Azure DevOps, you can add the Application Insights widget to your Azure DevOps dashboard. This allows you to view and track key usage and performance trends directly from your DevOps environment.
What are some typical alerts you can set up in Azure Monitor?
Some typical alerts that can be set up in Azure Monitor include excessive CPU usage, memory leaks, slow response times, and an unusually high number of requests or failures.
How can you set up alerts in Azure Monitor?
Alerts in Azure Monitor can be set up from the Azure portal, using the Monitor Blade. You define a condition based on metrics or logs, and then create an action group which is a collection of notification preferences defined by the user.
What are log queries in Azure Monitor?
Log Queries in Azure Monitor provide a way to retrieve, consolidate, and analyze collected data. They are written in a flexible query language called Kusto Query Language (KQL) which makes it easy to identify trends, track specific events, and perform root cause analysis.
What is the role of the Application Insights SDK?
The Application Insights SDK is used to collect telemetry data from your application. The SDK sends this data to Application Insights service where you can analyze and visualize it.
Can Azure Monitor and Application Insights be used together?
Yes, both tools can be used together to create a comprehensive monitoring solution. While Azure Monitor provides infrastructure monitoring, Application Insights provides deep insights into your application’s performance and usage.
What is the latency of data appearing in Azure Monitor?
The latency of data appearing in Azure Monitor can be as low as a minute but can vary depending on numerous factors including the volume of data you are sending.
Can I export data from Application Insights?
Yes, you can export data from Application Insights to various destinations like a storage account, event hub, or Azure Monitor Logs for further analysis and long-term retention.
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