Azure Monitor is a comprehensive service that collects, analyzes, and acts on telemetry data from both Azure and on-premises environments. It helps ensure the performance, availability, and reliability of your applications and infrastructure.
What Azure Monitor Does
Azure Monitor collects data from a wide range of sources, including virtual machines, storage accounts, applications, and on-premises systems.
- You can view reports and insights through the Azure Monitor Dashboard in the Azure Portal.
- Data can be visualized in Power BI for deeper analysis and reporting.
- You can send alerts via email, text, or push notification when events occur or thresholds are crossed.
- Azure Monitor also provides autoscale functionality, automatically adjusting resources based on defined performance thresholds.
Components of Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor consists of several key components that work together to provide a full picture of your environment:
1. Activity Log
- Data begins collecting automatically when you create your first resource.
- Records management operations such as when a Virtual Machine (VM) is started, stopped, or modified.
2. Metrics
- Captures numeric performance values (for example, CPU percentage or storage latency).
- Provides near real-time monitoring for tracking trends and performance over time.
3. Logs
- Stores log and performance data for detailed analysis.
- Can be queried using Log Analytics, a tool that uses the Kusto Query Language (KQL) to analyze operational and diagnostic data.
4. Alerts
- You can configure metric alerts and log alerts to notify you when a certain threshold is crossed.
- Alerts can trigger emails, text messages, or automated actions such as scaling a service or invoking a Logic App.
5. Application Insights
- Designed for developers to monitor application performance.
- Collects telemetry directly from your application code and detects performance anomalies.
- Supports custom events, helping identify slow response times, failed requests, and dependency bottlenecks.
Relationship Between Services
Azure Monitor serves as the central monitoring platform, with Application Insights and Log Analytics as integrated sub-services:
- Application Insights focuses on application-level monitoring.
- Log Analytics focuses on analyzing operational logs.
- Both feed into Azure Monitor, allowing unified dashboards, queries, and alerts.
Why Azure Monitor Matters
Azure Monitor provides the tools to observe, analyze, and automate your Azure environment. It works in harmony with:
- Azure Service Health for health notifications,
- Azure Advisor for optimization recommendations, and
- Azure Policy for governance and compliance.
Together, these services ensure your Azure environment remains healthy, secure, and efficient.
Next Steps
For AZ-900, focus on the purpose of Azure Monitor — to collect and analyze data from Azure and on-premises systems, and to enable alerts, autoscaling, and performance insights.
If you’d like a clear overview of all AZ-900 fundamentals, our AZ-900 video course explains each area with simple examples to help you prepare effectively – or go back to the AZ-900 list of topics.
Please click here to find out more about Microsoft’s AZ-900 exam.
