Monitoring Azure solutions

- [Instructor] Let's start this course by reviewing the different solutions that are available to you to monitor your Azure resources and deployments. The first one we're going to start with is System Center. This is normally a solution that we think of for monitoring our existing on-premise implementations by gathering performance data and events. We typically see this in larger environments. If you are planning on using System Center to monitor your Azure Virtual Machines, then you'll need to install an agent on those Azure Virtual Machines.

System Center integrates with Log Analytics and we'll be talking about Log Analytics in a few moments. Next we have the Azure Operations Management Suite. This is a born in the cloud monitoring solution, and this will also integrate with System Center. We'll be talking about Operations Management Suite in more detail in an upcoming lesson. Next, we have the Azure Monitor. This provides infrastructure-level data from our virtual machines, our virtual machine scale sets, and the service fabric.

Data is collected from application logs, diagnostic logs, activity logs, and metrics. Keep in mind here that your activity logs are stored for 90 days. Next we have Log Analytics. We use Log Analytics to collect and aggregate our data, and this data could be from Azure, on-premise, or other cloud solutions, such as AWS, or Amazon Web Services. Log Analytics is an Azure service, so it's already part of Azure, you don't have to do anything to enable it.

It comes with rich tools to analyze your data, as well as you can perform complex queries against the data. You can set it up to provide notification on specific conditions, and as we already mentioned a few moments ago, it will integrate with System Center Operations Manager, or SCOM, to monitor your on-premise environment. You can access Log Analytics either through the Azure portal or through Operations Management Suite, or OMS. Next we have Application Insights.

We use Application Insights to monitor our live web apps. Application Insights will detect anomalies and we can pull telemetry from host environments. Application Insights is geared for our developers or our dev teams. We'll be spending some time on Application Insights in an upcoming lesson. Another way to monitor your Azure resources is by using the Azure Security Center. Here, you can prevent, detect, and respond to threats. The Security Center will provide recommendations to help you secure your Azure resources, and the Security Center will also suggest partner solutions or tools that may be of benefit to you.

Next, we have the Azure Advisor. The Azure Advisor will provide information on best practices, and it will recommend solutions to improve performance, high availability, security and cost-cutting measures. The Azure Service Health service will provide information on current service issues, planned maintenance, any health advisories, health history, and resource health. We'll be looking at the Azure Health Service in more detail in an upcoming lesson.

Finally, if you're not happy with the Azure solutions, you can go ahead and leverage one of the many third party monitoring solutions that are available to you. As you just learned, there are several tools to help you manage and monitor your Azure resources. You may find you may only use one or two of these, or you may use all of them. If you haven't explored any of them, I would highly recommend that you do so. Some of them are really cool.