Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor manages visibility and responsiveness in complex cloud and hybrid environments by providing a comprehensive monitoring solution. At its core, Azure Monitor collects, analyzes, and responds to monitoring data from various layers and components of your system, including applications, infrastructure, and custom data sources across Azure and non-Azure subscriptions and tenants.

The technical architecture of Azure Monitor involves several key components. It collects data from multiple sources, including platform metrics, logs, distributed traces, and changes, which are stored in optimized data stores for each type of data. The Azure Monitor Agent (AMA) plays a crucial role in collecting monitoring data from the guest operating system of Azure and hybrid virtual machines, replacing the legacy Log Analytics agent. The AMA can be installed on individual machines or at scale using Azure Policy and integrates with various services like Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

Operationally, Azure Monitor requires careful configuration to maximize its benefits. You need to configure diagnostic settings to collect detailed data from your resources and set up alert rules to notify you of critical events. Alerts can be triggered based on metric or log data and can initiate action groups that include notifications, automation runbooks, and other automated workflows. The system also supports recommended out-of-the-box alert rules and allows for scaling alerts using Azure policies.

Key operational considerations include managing costs, as some features incur charges based on data collection and retention. The Azure Monitor Agent itself is free, but data ingestion and storage costs apply. Additionally, ensuring the right permissions is crucial, as Azure role-based access control governs who can create, manage, and access alerts.

Technically, Azure Monitor supports a wide range of metrics and log categories, which can be accessed through the Azure portal, REST API, or command-line tools. Metrics can be exported to other locations using diagnostic settings or the REST API, though there are limitations around multi-dimensional metrics. Guest OS metrics, collected via the Azure Monitor Agent, can be routed to the same metric database as platform metrics or to Azure Monitor Logs for combined analysis.