This document summarizes a presentation about mastering Azure Monitor. It introduces Azure Monitor and its components, including metrics, logs, dashboards, alerts, and workbooks. It provides a brief history of how Azure Monitor was developed. It also explains the different data sources that can be monitored like the Azure platform, Application Insights, and Log Analytics. The presentation encourages attendees to navigate the "maze" of Azure Monitor and provides resources to help learn more, including an upcoming virtual event and blog post series on monitoring.

1. Mastering
Azure Monitor
22 April 2020
Richard Benwell, Founder CEO, SquaredUp
UK Azure User Group

2. Before I forget (or you leave)…
Azure Monitor Virtual Series
Tuesday, April 28, 2020 9:00 AM–12:00 PM Pacific Time
A. Sivakumar
Director of Program Management,
Azure Monitor
https://info.microsoft.com/Azure-Monitor-Virtual-Series-Registration.html
https://bit.ly/2Vtqa2g

3. Before I forget (or you leave)…
9 part blog series covering every aspect of Azure Monitor
https://squaredup.com/blog/from-zero-to-hero-my-azure-monitor-learning-path/
https://bit.ly/2xSpOZZ

4. A quick poll

5. Who’s using Azure in production?

6. Who’s mastered Azure monitoring?

7. Why monitoring?

8. Why monitoring?
ObservabilityAwarenessControl
Outputs that can be
observed
Knowing what is
happeningAchieving the aims
Goals
Taking action

9. Why monitoring?
Monitoring
ObservabilityAwarenessControlGoals

10. Why monitoring?
Measuring speed
Wheel direction
Engine speed
Fuel level
Oil level
Dashboard
Windscreen!
Arrive at destination
safely, efficiently,
comfortably, quickly
Changing speed
Changing direction
Refuel
Servicing
ObservabilityAwarenessControlGoals

11. Why monitoring?
Metrics, logs, traces
Dashboards, alerts,
analysis
Uptime, performance,
success rate, security, cost
“SLA”
Scale, re-configure,
bug fix,
failover/restore
ObservabilityAwarenessControlGoals

12. Why should you care?
DevOps
DeveloperSRE
Business
Single owner
Write awesome code?
Be more awesome and make it observable.
Work backwards
from business needs.
ObservabilityAwarenessControlGoals

13. Why should you care?
Cloud
Architect
Cost
Security
Performance
Efficiency
Consistency
ObservabilityAwarenessControl
ObservabilityAwarenessControl
ObservabilityAwarenessControl
Multiple
applications

14. Why Azure Monitor?

15. Why Azure Monitor?
Established
Cross-platform
Feature-rich
Best for Azure
Built-in
Cost-effective
APM, Log Analytics
Platform-level
monitoring
Vendor-neutral
monitoring

16. Mastering Azure Monitor

17. Azure Monitor

18. It can be a bit of a maze.
It’s changing all the time.
There are dangers.
But an amazing world is there to find…
Sound familiar?
Navigating Azure Monitor

19. Dashboards
Platform
(metrics and logs)
Workbooks
Log AnalyticsInsights
App Insights
Alerts
Monitor

20. The building of the maze (A short history of Azure Monitor*)
SCOM Op Insights OMS Log Analytics
App Insights
Azure platform monitoring
Azure Monitor
team logging
‘Kusto’ log data
platform
Azure portal
Automation, backup etc Automation, backup etc
Azure portal
Azure portal
* Totally unofficial, from personal observations

21. “Kusto”
Database technology designed for App Insights
Similar to Splunk, Elastic, etc
Now available standalone as “Azure Data Explorer”
New query language KQL = “Kusto Query Language”
Blend of SQL and PowerShell
https://squaredup.com/blog/kusto-101-a-jumpstart-guide-to-kql/
https://dataexplorer.azure.com/clusters/help/databases/Samples
ConferenceSessions | where conference == 'Ignite 2018' | order by session_title

22. Dashboards
Platform
(metrics and logs)
Workbooks
Log AnalyticsInsights
App Insights
Alerts
Monitor

23. It’s time to run the maze

24. Platform

25. Platform Metrics and Logs
FREE, as in:
- No effort (out of the box)
- No charge
Short-term retention
Mostly metrics, some logs
Examples:
- App Service
- Virtual Machine

26. App Insights

27. Application Insights
Needs a ‘Application Insights’ instance
Monitor web applications
• IIS on VMs, AppService, Functions
• .NET, Java, PHP, Python, node.js
Application Performance Management (APM)
• Availability - URL ‘ping’ / synthetic transaction
• Real user monitoring (RUM) – JS injected in
browser
• Web server monitoring (HTTP requests,
metrics)
• Code-level monitoring
• Database query monitoring

28. Log Analytics

29. Log Analytics
Needs a ‘Log Analytics
Workspace’ instance.
Collect data from:
- Inside VM (Microsoft
Monitoring Agent)
- Logs (e.g. IIS logs, event logs)
- Performance metrics (e.g. CPU)
- Azure platform logging (e.g.
storage)
- Other Azure logs

30. Monitor

31. Monitor
Global (per tenant) UI
Access all metrics, logs, alerts
and workbooks
Across all platform, App
Insights and Log Analytics
instances.

32. Alerts
Unified alerting!
Azure resource Rule Action group
12-part blog series on Azure Monitor Alerts
https://cloudadministrator.net/2019/08/15/azure-monitor-alerts-series-part-1/

33. Dashboard options
SharingBuilt-in Graphing
Azure Monitor Grafana SquaredUp

34. Are you ready to run the maze?

35. Reminder
Azure Monitor Virtual Series
Tuesday, April 28, 2020 9:00 AM–12:00 PM Pacific Time
A. Sivakumar
Director of Program Management,
Azure Monitor
https://info.microsoft.com/Azure-Monitor-Virtual-Series-Registration.html
https://bit.ly/2Vtqa2g

36. Reminder
https://squaredup.com/blog/from-zero-to-hero-my-azure-monitor-learning-path/
https://bit.ly/2xSpOZZ

37. Thank for listening!
Any questions?