Welcome to the “Introducing” series. In the previous blog post, we introduced the query language Kusto. In this blog post, we will introduce another solution within Azure called Monitor (or Azure Monitor).

What is Azure Monitor?

Logically enough, Azure Monitor is used primarily to monitor resources that exist in Azure. There are exceptions to this via technology such as Azure ARC but in general, Monitor is to provide monitoring and alerting for Azure resources.

What is Azure Monitor used for?

Monitor & Visualize Metrics: We introduced metrics in the Log Analytics portion of this blog series. For compute resources an example of a metric in Azure monitor would be Percentage CPU. The graphic below shows how metrics can be easily visualized through Azure Monitor.

Metrics are not limited to compute type resources. Resources that exist in Azure either already provide (or likely soon will provide) metric information specific to their services. The graphic below shows how CPU percentage can be shown for non-Compute of resources (a SQL database in this case).

Insights: Insights provide pre-built visualizations for various services in Azure. Examples of these pre-built insights are shown below.

If we look into the Virtual Machines insights we see common metrics which we would expect for compute-based resources (CPU, memory, bytes sent/received, disk space used – shown in the graphic below).

Query & Analyze Logs: The ability to query and analyze logs in Azure Monitor brings us into Log Analytics via the query experience using Kusto. For details see previous blog posts in this series on these topics.

Alerts & Actions: Azure Monitor can generate alerts for conditions that it finds for resources that existing within your IT organization’s tenant. This is done by selecting the type of resource that you want to alert on, and the location of the resource.

The alerts pane shows a quick summary view of recently generated alerts (shown below) which can be used to drill into details on specific alerts. Azure Monitor also lets you define actions that occur when your alert fires – such as sending an email or calling a webhook.

Overall, Azure Monitor provides an effective method to provide monitoring and alerts for the resources which are available in your Azure subscription.

How is Azure Monitor priced?

Azure Monitor pricing is based on a variety of usage-related metrics (platform logs, metrics, health monitoring, alert rules, notifications, SMS, and Voice calls). For details on pricing check out the pricing calculator at Pricing – Azure Monitor | Microsoft Azure.

Series Navigation:

• Go back to the previous article in the series: Introducing Kusto
• Continue to the next in this series: Introducing Workbooks