Azure Monitor Tools: How to Manage and Monitor Your Azure Infrastructure with Ease

Azure monitoring tools let you collect data from applications, services and other resources in your Microsoft Azure, and/or other cloud and hybrid environments. The data that Azure Monitor collects using a myriad of tools are saved into metrics and logs before undergoing further analysis and evaluation. The Azure Monitor tools support the performance and availability of your platform and give your IT staff the ability to fix issues before they can cause problems that can impact your environment significantly.

Learn About the Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor is essential in supporting the availability of your applications and services running on Azure or some other cloud platform, and even in your on-premises infrastructure, and their ability to handle current workloads and to accommodate future jobs.

Azure Monitor collects data from various sources in your environment, saves them into metrics and logs, and runs them through the various tools that come standard with the service for further analysis. With Azure Monitor, signs of impending failure are caught early on and addressed before they can bring the environment down.

Data for analysis can be sourced from applications, operating systems, Azure resources and various other custom sources, including your Azure subscription and tenants.

Since Azure Monitor is part of the Azure platform, you do not need to use a third-party service to monitor your applications and services. You can also use the Azure Monitor tools to aggregate data coming from any of your on-premises applications and servers.

The Azure Monitor tools and features include:

Application Insights: Detects and diagnoses issues related to applications and their dependencies.
Azure Monitor for VMs: Monitors and analyzes virtual machine (VM) data.
Azure Monitor for containers: Monitors and analyzes container data.
Log Analytics: Analyzes metrics and logs to catch and diagnose potential infrastructure problems.
Azure Monitor Metrics: Monitors and collects data from various sources within your infrastructure.
Smart alerts: Combines alerts to arrive at a potential common root cause, making sure that real problems are isolated from the noise generated by triggering too many alerts at the same time.
Automated actions: Used in combination with smart alerts to generate actions meant to address issues.
Azure dashboards and workbooks: Visualizations that allow easy monitoring of your environment.

Learn About Azure Monitor Metrics

Azure Monitor Metrics is one of the two types of data gathered by Azure Monitor, which collects numeric data from your environment at regular intervals. The collected data is put in a time-series database for real-time automated or interactive analysis. When a potential issue is detected, an alert is triggered, and the issue is displayed on the dashboard or workbook. An automated action can also be triggered to address the issue immediately.

Azure Monitor Metrics have the following as their primary data sources:

Azure resources: Each Azure resource generates metrics data out of the box. By default, Azure Monitor collects this data at one-minute intervals, although you can specify a custom interval if necessary.
Applications: Application Insights gathers usage metrics from monitored applications, allowing detection of application issues before they can become full-blown problems. You can specify which applications need to be monitored.
VM agents: Metrics from guest operating systems of VMs can be collected using either a Windows or Linux agent.

Aside from the above-mentioned main data sources, you can also gather custom metrics using either Application Insights or the custom metrics API.

Most metrics in Azure are stored for 93 days, with a few exceptions:

Classic Guest OS metrics are stored for 14 days by default.
Guest OS metrics sent to a Log Analytics workspace are stored for 31 days but can be extended for up to two years for long-term trend analysis.

Consolidate Logs Through Azure Monitor Logs

Azure Monitor Logs refers to the other type of data gathered by Azure Monitor. These are the logs and performance data of resources that have been tapped for monitoring and include platform logs from Azure services, log and performance data from VM agents, and usage and performance metrics from applications.

The myriad collection of data in Azure Monitor Logs is stored in Log Analytics workspaces. They are subjected to further analysis using the Kusto Query Language (KQL), which was built purposely to go through millions of records quickly. KQL is the same query language used in the Azure Data Explorer, the fully-managed big-data analytics service built on Azure.

With Log Analytics, you can use log queries in alert rules that trigger when an issue arises. Application Insights also includes prebuilt queries. Log queries can also be used with other Azure Monitor features.

The Log Analytics tool can also be used to create log queries and analyze their results interactively. You can run Log Analytics from the Logs option in the Azure Monitor menu or from other services in the Azure portal.

Understand the Use of Distributed Tracing

Azure Monitor uses distributed tracing in troubleshooting issues found in modern cloud and microservices architectures. It identifies performance and reliability issues in your Azure and other cloud environments.

Azure Monitor displays distributed trace data for your applications in either a transaction diagnostics view or an application map view. In the transaction diagnostics view, Azure Monitor uses per-request metrics to identify the root cause of an issue. In an application map view, Azure Monitor aggregates transaction metrics and uses them to identify average performance and errors.

To enable distributed tracing in your Azure environment, you can use either the appropriate Application Insights SDK for your application or the open-source OpenCensus metrics collection and distributed tracing library. Application Insights SDKs are available for .NET, .NET Core, Java, Node.js and JavaScript, among other programming languages.

Manage Virtual Machines and Virtual Desktops in Azure with Parallels RAS

Parallels® Remote Application Server (RAS) supports Microsoft Azure hypervisor as a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) provider. It also supports Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH) workloads directly on Microsoft Azure, creating, scaling and managing these workloads on demand.

With Parallels RAS, organizations can scale the IT infrastructure and monitor resources automatically, allowing high performance of virtual applications and desktops. This capability ensures a balance between availability and compute cost on Microsoft Azure, leading to faster deployments, simplified management and lower costs.

In addition, organizations can extend and simplify the capabilities of Windows Virtual Desktop by integrating and managing all workloads and resources from the Parallels RAS Console. IT administrators can use pre-built VM templates and wizards to streamline, provision and manage Windows Virtual Desktop workloads and components. Thus, a solution that integrates Parallels RAS with Windows Virtual Desktop can be delivered easily to end users.

Using Parallels RAS, you can manage VMs from different hypervisors under the same infrastructure. You can also build a flexible, multi-cloud IT infrastructure using on-premises or public cloud solutions such as Microsoft Azure, or a combination of both.

By deploying Parallels RAS on Azure Cloud Service, you can provide employees with immediate and secure access to applications, server-based desktops, data and folders without the need for complex firewall configurations. Instant access to resources is also possible using any HTML5 browser.

Download the trial to see how easily you can use Parallels RAS in your Azure environment.