Azure Monitor Reviews

I am a developer who uses Azure Monitor for telemetry of the applications that I work on. Application Insights is one of those tools, and I have also used other non-Azure products before. Currently, I am using Azure on a day-to-day basis for telemetry and that kind of thing.

Specifically, I have not really dove into Azure Monitor. It has been more focused on Application Insights telemetry. I am not in operations, so it really depends on the request of the business and their use cases for monitoring applications that I implement application monitoring.

Azure Monitor is the telemetry solution, and I believe Azure Monitor is now formally known by that name. Historically it was always named Application Insights.

From a business standpoint, I think the ability to see where your users are is valuable. I also appreciate the ability to measure feature activity, see what types of devices they are on, follow specific use cases, and measure the amount of traffic going to a particular application.

I feel Azure Monitor does a fair job. I do feel it is not a streaming service in my opinion. There are advantages to having stream messaging and logging on that level. But for what it is, I feel it does well. My perspective is more based on an Application Insights agent running on a service or an app service and sending the telemetry via the agent, and also doing the filtering of telemetry at the agent level so you are not having a ton of telemetry. I believe Azure Monitor does pretty much the same thing.

I have also used tools such as New Relic, and New Relic is a much more robust tool, but that is a different product and you are going to pay for that. It is a different offering altogether.

The subscription that we had at the time allowed for a couple gigabytes of telemetry during the month, and I believe that telemetry only lives for about two months. You have to experiment with it to see how much you want to pay. I was not really involved in the pricing. It was more along the lines of we were running up against our limits in terms of the amount of free telemetry or telemetry that we get with our subscription, and so we either needed to scale back or turn specific telemetry types off or do some more sampling. It is nice that those capabilities are there so that you can reduce the amount of telemetry. I cannot really speak to pricing but I do believe that it is somewhat reasonable for Azure Monitor. New Relic is pretty expensive, I believe.

It was probably about six months, which was about two years ago.

It seemed relatively quick. Azure Gov services were a little flaky for a while. However, during the course of the project, I have started seeing the capability and reliability to be a little more stable.

Scalability is really based on the insights that can be gained based on how the APM is implemented within the application. For instance, if you have services that are running nightly or services that are running every hour, you can track the duration of how long those services run as well as how many things that are being processed within a particular run. You can gather metrics on basically whether you need to scale up or scale down, depending on volume. With APM, you can go heavy or you can go light. It just depends on what you want, what your use case is, and how reactive you want to be to system load or resilient to failure.

I actually have not ever interfaced directly with Microsoft support. I was using Azure Gov, and it has different endpoints for telemetry. It was not as straightforward as the normal telemetry endpoints, meaning that you had to be on the VPN and do all of that. When I was having connectivity issues, I would inform someone else on the team and then they would engage Microsoft support as needed.

I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.

I think Azure Monitor's main use case is for monitoring purposes only. Azure Monitor itself makes the purpose clear with its name. The purpose is for monitoring.

Azure Monitor is helpful for various purposes, including Application Performance Monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, DevOps, and automation. These are the three major aspects everyone appreciates.

The alerting features definitely help in reducing operational downtime for my customers by allowing us to get notifications in advance and take active actions.

The major advantage of Log Analytics is that it's centralized for all Azure services and it provides a powerful query language. It's also closely integrated with Azure Monitor and Azure Insight.

Azure Monitor full stack visibility in managing applications' health helps with APM, infrastructure monitoring, multi-cloud monitoring, security and compliance monitoring, and DevOps and automation monitoring.

Once you set up the automation features, operational efficiency improves because automation means you have a set of tasks and alerts. Once the initial configuration is done, the job becomes easier for the support team.

The challenges with Azure Monitor are that it's initially complex to set up because you need multiple components. Azure Monitor is one thing, but within Azure Monitor, you need to bring Log Analytics data, Application Insight, create metrics, and set up alerts. All these are normally the basic work you have to do.

The initial setup can take a week or up to four weeks, depending on the scale and how big the initiative is.

The cost transparency can be improved to make Azure Monitor better.

I cannot specify a percentage, but better predictive cost modeling and a simplified onboarding process are keywords for improvement.

I have been working with Azure Monitor for five years.

There are no issues with stability; it is a stable solution.

Azure Monitor is very scalable; there are no issues with scalability for different kinds of businesses.

I have been in contact with Microsoft support regarding Azure Monitor, but we haven't specifically reached out for support on this one. Generally, they are supportive.

I would rate the support for Azure Monitor as a seven.

Positive

When working with Azure Monitor, I consider essential telemetry metrics to be anything happening on the CPU percentage change and infrastructure-level changes. It collects data from the metrics such as CPU percentage, request rate, and latency. Pretty much all Azure services are connected to Azure Monitor, allowing data collection, sourcing, and analysis.

My customers see value for money with Azure Monitor. They often don't understand why operational tools are needed until something goes wrong, at which point they realize Azure Monitor helps prevent impacts on their system.

My customers are mainly from the Big Four industries, which refers to firms such as Deloitte and KPMG.

I recommend those who plan to use Azure Monitor to better plan the architecture.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Azure Monitor a nine.

In our organization, we use Azure Monitor for all our native Azure services. Our whole technology stack is in Azure. We use it for native services such as metrics, logs from our Azure Key Vault, Azure PostgreSQL, Azure Kubernetes, and Azure Cosmos DB, and everything similar to that.

The major challenge that remains is the costing factor for the logs ingestion. The per GB cost is more than three dollars per GB. For using services such as Kubernetes, it's very easy to integrate Azure Monitor, however, the cost skyrockets once you start using it.

Stream Analytics is something that we just started evaluating from one of our projects, however, I'm not particularly hands-on with it. As far as Azure Monitor is concerned, I do use it.

The ease of access in Azure is significant since it's native to the platform and easy to integrate. It has no maintenance overhead, and users don't have to navigate to another portal to get their desired result. It's the handiness that it has, rather than the features.

The interpretation from the logs and injection requires custom runbooks. While it's complex, many services provide native insights and workbooks. It does the basic job quite efficiently.

They added new kinds of metrics with more integrations to send out metrics. They have even added support for third-party tools that can be integrated. Azure Monitor is working on improvements and becoming more mature.

Azure Monitor is stable and scalable.

Azure Monitor is evolving with new workbooks and dashboards.

The primary challenge is the documentation.

The major challenge that remains is the costing factor for the logs ingestion. The cost skyrockets once you start using it, and there are complaints that the actual cost of the Kubernetes cluster was less than the cost they were incurring for Azure Monitor.

There should be official documentation about optimization, and users should be informed prior to opting for the service at a glance. At the initial sign-up, there appears to be huge hidden costs associated with using the service.

Azure Monitor doesn't help in resource optimization.

We have been using Azure Monitor for more than three years now.

It's complex to evaluate Microsoft technical support. The official Microsoft support is very good in the region. However, speaking from Pakistan, they have outsourced support which is very ineffective. Users end up getting no resolution from their team as they're outsourced vendors, and they don't have deeper expertise over any of the products they are referring to.

Regarding the technical support, I would rate it less than five out of ten.

Neutral

We worked with Grafana stack in parallel.

It's quite easy to set up.

The pricing of Azure Monitor rates around six out of ten.

I would recommend Azure Monitor for people who are on Azure Cloud since it's native to the platform. It's easy to spin up and doesn't have an overhead of a different portal. In the same portal, users get the alerts and additional features.

We don't technically use AI for it, so I cannot comment on this aspect.

There are other services we use, such as the cost management portal in Azure Portal, which is a separate service. We use that for cost management purposes and haven't used Azure Monitor for this purpose at all.

Overall, I rate Azure Monitor nine out of ten.

I am using Azure Monitor for monitoring our infrastructure and Azure, our clients.

I mostly need Azure Monitor internally since everything is working fine. However, there is sometimes a lack of resources. For instance, there can be a huge load on the server causing the CPU usage to go high, and the Azure application network may have issues. Occasionally, I need to scale up. Resource monitoring is essential. 

Additionally, I can conclude reports for the monthly, weekly, and peak time of the resources since all the logs are collected in the Workspace. I can access them in the dashboard reports, all due to Azure Monitor.

Azure Monitor can improve by adding some kind of storage for logs. I can get the runtime logs alone, yet if Azure Monitor can independently add one gigabyte, two gigabytes, or five gigabytes at least to log storage, I can fix the logs without syncing with Log Analytics Workspace and Sentinel. If they do that, and if they can integrate a little pricing adjustment, it will be profitable for the Microsoft tool.

I have used the solution for five years.

Basically, Azure Monitor is working fine, yet I face a costing issue as if there are a lot of logs collected in the workspace or in the center, it becomes very costly. Otherwise, Azure Monitor is adequate.

Azure Monitor is not scalable alone, yet I have to integrate other tools for collecting the logs. It is a good product, however, if Microsoft can add storage inside Monitor, I do not need to integrate any other application for collecting the logs.

If I contact the First Line Support, they seem disconnected and lack technical information. They just collect a log or screenshot, tell me they will get back, and only one or two out of ten are technical. I have to guide them. However, the second-line support is good.

There is nothing complex. I am clear about that. For ValiMen, I only need to set an alert, yet during runtime, there are hundreds of thresholds, and a layman user doesn't know what each threshold means. It can be difficult for laymen. For those working on the UI, it is very easy. For me, it is ten by ten. For a layman user, it might be five out of ten or six out of ten.

Azure Monitor is fine and bearable. However, when I export logs into the application, workspace, log analytic workspace, and into Sentinel to read reports, I need to add storage, which increases the cost. I can check the cost.

Azure Monitor can streamline my workload by providing reports. I can monitor costs, whether I am running out or under-utilizing resources. Reports enable me to reduce and scale my infrastructure efficiently. 

For example, if Aviom is running for one year with four CPUs, two CPUs might be enough. By reading analytics, I can also reduce cost. 

The overall product rating is nine out of ten.

I use Azure Monitor to monitor infrastructure. For instance, monitoring virtual machines on Azure, and I use it to monitor some management services like Azure Web Application, Azure Event Hub, Azure storage accounting, and Azure Kubernetes service. I am currently using several different use cases.

We use Azure Monitor to increase our visibility and help the company avoid disasters or application breakdowns. The operation team customizes metrics and thresholds to prevent breakdowns in applications.

I find the query language in this tool very beneficial, as it allows me to customize some dashboards and create alerts according to my thresholds and metrics. 

We can generate actions such as creating tickets in ServiceNow or sending email alerts. Another valuable feature of Azure Monitor is its integration with Azure Application Insights, which gives us a holistic view of our applications, encompassing the infrastructure and application layers.

The pricing model could be more flexible. It is not very clear, and the current model used by Microsoft for this component could be adjusted to be more customer-friendly.

I have used Azure Monitor for three to four years.

Azure Monitor is very stable. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate it as ten. We do not have any problems with stability.

The scalability of Azure Monitor is very good.

I would rate customer service an eight. It is comparable to other support from Microsoft. I have had some tickets for other components related to monitoring and application visibility.

Positive

I used other monitoring tools like Zabbix and New Relic. Zabbix is more comprehensive for monitoring infrastructure and network layers, while Azure Monitor is better for monitoring application layers.

The initial setup of Azure Monitor is very easy. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the easiest, it is a ten.

The tool is very good, but the pricing model is not clear. While it is not the most expensive nor the cheapest, it falls in the middle. Microsoft could be more flexible with the pricing model.

I have used New Relic, Zabbix, Elastic, and Grafana for specific cases.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We are in a consulting firm. Based on the requirement, we utilize our solutions. If any application requires specific monitoring, then we use Azure Monitor. We try to utilize the application functionality available, subject to the application requirements.

Azure Monitor helps us manage and monitor based on the requirements set by our clients. It allows us to provide solutions effectively.

The security and support are good. I am a part of the solution team and provide solutions related to monitoring, backup, security, and hosting for our clients.

No improvements are needed from my perspective.

I have been working with Azure Monitor as a consultant for around two years.

I would rate the stability at a nine out of ten since you cannot stop all threats. That said, Azure Monitor provides sufficient protection.

Azure Monitor is scalable from the infrastructure point of view.

Whenever we require support, we receive it, and the availability is high. I would rate it ten out of ten.

Positive

Organizations also use Azure Sentinel for better details and more options, however, we have not replaced Azure Monitor.

Setup is handled by the implementation team and is considered straightforward.

Our implementation team is well aware of the process and parameters required for deploying Azure Monitor.

Pricing is handled by the finance department, so I don't have insight into it.

Monitoring is a part of many applications with their own dashboards. We also use Azure Sentinel.

I recommend Azure to others because there are multiple service providers, however, Azure meets our requirements well. It depends on the client's needs and availability.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I have used the cloud version of Azure Monitor. If customers actively use a bunch of servers or resources and need to monitor the metrics of those devices or resources. Azure Monitor is used in such aforementioned cases for monitoring.

For instance, if a resource has been changed or access has been granted to a specific resource, a certain hard disk is offline, or a critical amount of disc space is in use, an alert needs to be generated and forwarded to the concerned professional, who is meant to work on resolving the alerts. 

Suppose a CPU is running at 100% capacity for a long duration. In that case, a service desk professional or a system administrator needs to be alerted using Azure Monitor to take appropriate action. 

The features that are most valuable are the alerting function and the logging functionality to analyze certain issues using log analytics or queries. The solution also supports deployment towards a set of resources based on data collection rules. 

The onboarding process of certain assets and the overall UI can be improved in Azure Monitor. 

The solution should allow the addition of certain assets to the monitoring process so that they can be incorporated into the existing monitoring set. The aforementioned process is possible using data collection rules, but it might also be possible to use agents or a network scan to find resources that can be implemented. 

I have been using Azure Monitor for one and a half years. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. The solution can offer impressive scalability because there aren't any limits in terms of tiers that need to be adhered to. Resource addition to Azure Monitor can be carried out in a straightforward manner. The cost of the solution escalates with the proportion of data ingestion, but it's quite logical. There are between 100 to 200 users of Azure Monitor in our organization. The usage of the solution varies day to day in our company. 

I would recommend others to use the solution and to keep it updated, but presently, in our company, we don't have plans to increase the usage of Azure Monitor. 

In our company, we previously used PRTG Monitor which had similar capabilities to Azure Monitor. Our company decided to switch to Azure Monitor because they were willing to deal with solutions from a single vendor. As our company expanded, they needed a vendor as a partner who had solutions suitable for large-scale companies and their internal base units. 

I would rate the initial setup as seven out of ten. The tool's configuration and usage are highly intuitive. The maintenance of the solution is majorly handled by the vendor in our company, but we still remain responsible for the data collection rules and alerts.

Our company team also remains in charge of actively incorporating the correct resources that need to be monitored by the customer team from the vendor. In our company, a team of eleven professionals remain involved in the maintenance process. 

When the solution's monitoring feature is implemented, you can guarantee the continuity of your company's IT environment and prevent data outages. Due to the high availability of your company's services, you can achieve a high ROI with Azure Monitor. 

I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten. Besides standard licensing fees the customer needs to additionally pay based on the ingested data size. The settings of the solution can be tailored during purchase based on the size of data collection and monitoring, but the cost of the solution will also increase with the data size. 

For infrastructure monitoring in our company, the alerting feature has been the most beneficial as it notifies on time to manage certain actions. Azure Monitor has impressive integration capabilities. It's not only a complete infrastructure in terms of certain resources residing in the Azure tenant; edge resources can monitor certain assets that are not in the cloud but are on-premises.  

Some time ago, our company had high CPU usage, and it was across Azure Virtual Desktops, we used certain metrics to view how many resources were in use and what was the cause of it. Then, based on the overview of the aforementioned step our company team decided to upscale some services so that the resources were more evenly divided and spread out.

Following the aforementioned initiative, the complaints regarding performance issues were eradicated. Based on the input or reports from Azure Monitor, our company team could make a decision, which in turn led to performance enhancement for end users. I would overall rate the product an eight out of ten. 

My advice to others would be to decide upfront which resources you would prefer to add to your monitoring, which is crucial for your organization, and what aspects you need to have Azure Monitor for. Due to the aforementioned initiative, you can start with the most essential features of Azure Monitor, and then you can add upon the original set later on to extend the monitoring capabilities. 

We use the solution for the monitoring of the agent. Whatever resources we create, it will install one agent on that resource. It will collect all the matrices. It will do a detailed analysis of how much CPU, RAM, and memory should be utilized. We can get all this information by using Azure Monitor.

Azure Monitor is a very easy-to-use product in the cloud environment.

We cannot use AI services with the solution.

I have been using Azure Monitor for five years.

Azure Monitor is a very stable product, and I don't find any bugs in it.

Around 50,000 users are using the solution in our organization.

I have contacted the technical support team regarding how to use the solution, how to monitor, and what to do if we lose any logs. I am happy with the technical support team and the information they provided.

The solution’s pricing depends on how much logs it collects.

The solution is deployed on the cloud in our organization.

Most of the resources are inbuilt monitoring systems. Apart from those things, we can have more monitoring by using the analytics tools. Azure will provide the insights and analytics tool to collect data from all the resources, and we can store it in one centralized storage account.

We can analyze and do a lot of research on the logs. Azure will provide all these things, and it is a very easy-to-use product. Azure Monitor is not a standalone product. An inbuilt agent will be already running when you create any VM or machine. On top of that, we can see the logs as soon as the VM or machine is created.

The solution's documentation is very easy to understand. We can go through the documentation, and we can find the related information very quickly. Azure Monitor is very easy to use.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use Azure Monitor to log all the activity logs and the resource logs to something similar to AWS CloudWatch. It is enabled for most of the services as it goes hand in hand with application insights.

Alerts are set up using robust metrics that we are able to retrieve from Azure Monitor, allowing us to automate and look at different rules and action groups. 

Our component configuration keeps changing. Because of this, we need to put alerts on the components to figure out who changed them and what did they changed in them.

We have been using Azure Monitor quite regularly, both for internal usage and for our customers. Customers will have to use Log Analytics in combination with Azure Monitor. 

Azure Monitor is a one-stop place to look at what's happening across all the resources. It provides a bird's eye view with histograms and gauges that we can build within IT. 

The alerting feature is also very valuable. 

Azure introduces new services almost every year. Recently, they have improved their integration with other resources, so we get even more robust data.

Unfortunately, Azure Monitor stalls quite a bit. Azure Monitor can take up to 60 seconds to bring up metrics data. That length of latency is terrible and needs to be improved. The ripple effect of one wrong configuration affects multiple resources within milliseconds. Azure Monitor then reports after more than a minute that something went wrong. To improve this, Azure should create a visual representation of what the resource configuration was and compare it to what changed.

Alerts are queries to figure out what has happened. If there was a reliable infrastructure diagram available, it could tell me where the configuration changed. Azure gives you so many logs, to understand where the change happens you have to review thousands of rows of logs.

In the cloud, there are too many resources, so you end up trying to find the needle in the haystack to determine what is actually happening. 

In future releases, I would like to see Azure Monitor improve its diagram capabilities. Azure, in the last few years, has started to provide some basic diagramming where you can visualize from an Azure point of view, what is happening at the Kubernetes cluster and how the various resources are related to each other, we still need to use a lot of third-party tools.

Imagine if an Excel sheet was thrown to you with a few thousand rows, and you were asked to determine what happened, within a minute or two, before a disaster strikes. A visualization tool is required to know what the previous configuration was as compared to the current configuration.

The solution is also reactionary and not proactive or intuitive. Azure Monitor should be able to alert you that certain changes will cause certain outcomes before making the change using futuristic infrastructure diagrams.

Lastly, I would like Azure Monitor to provide a separate portal for large operations teams, as there currently is no solution for them.

I started using Azure Monitor regularly in 2015.

The stability of Azure Monitor is good. It has not been a problem. The solution does not require maintenance. When we adopt new services, we need to configure things as part of a checklist of items. This is a minor step.

I would rate the stability a five out of five. 

Being a SaaS service, Azure Monitor is scalable. 

Customer service and support for Azure Monitor is good. I rate it a five out of five for technical support.

Positive

The initial setup of Azure Monitor is easy. The deployment took a day or two because it is available by default. It is really an out-of-the-box solution.

Our DevOps side handled the implementation of Azure Monitor themselves. 

The implementation strategy was and continues to be that whatever resources we want to monitor through Azure Monitor, we enable them. 

The ROI for Azure Monitor is poor. I would rate it a two out of five.

Because we have to use Log Analytics, in combination with Azure Monitor, it is expensive. It is expensive because the logs are getting generated for store requests across all the Azure resources. This is all that needs to be stored, and both in terms of hot and cold storage. Cold storage after 30 days, but hot storage is required for the NOC and the SOC teams, the network operations, and the security operations teams.

Typically, we do try to encourage our customers to keep at least 30 days within Azure Monitor.

I would rate Azure Monitor a two out of five for affordability.

We evaluate options through our customers' requests. We have found that Azure Monitor actually monitors every resource better than New Relic, Datadog, or Splunk.

Splunk is very good for on-premise servers. However, internally, we do not hold logs for more than 30 days, so Azure Monitor works for us. 

Azure Monitor has a lengthy latency period for dashboard alerts. Sometimes we get data in New Relic and Datadog faster than with Azure Monitor.

Anyone considering implementing Azure Monitor into their organization should consider the length of retention time required for their logs and applications. If it is beyond 30 days, Azure Monitor becomes expensive. 

Overall, I would rate Azure Monitor a seven out of ten. The features included in the solution are good, however, they lack development. They are allowing their partners to come up with good offerings, but not developing the core products themselves.

We use the solution for only production monitoring mainly, however, we are trying to engage it with the quality flows for moving the code between platforms from dev to test environments, et cetera. We'll implement this procedure afterward.

The detailed logging is great. Detailed logging is the most impressive part. Also, we are observing our cost on the live environment. We know what kind of budget is required. 

Also, we are getting all the problematic area details, so we can arrange ourselves according to the application development part. 

The alert parts are great. It's crucial for our site, just getting the alerts on time.

It's easy to set up.

It is a robust, stable product.

The solution scales well. 

We are sometimes confused about the details. We would like to have a flow in terms of how a new application should engage with Azure Monitor. We must understand: what is the most crucial part of our monitoring or support? We are not very good at it yet. 

Currently, it seems it's complicated to get the correct information in terms of what to do and how things work. Maybe it would help if they offered some guidance or written guides. For example, we say that project manager should follow their quality issues before putting the application into production. It's so complicated from their side for the project managers. Some kind of simplification is required for people engaged in the platform. 

Still, it's very new, and we will be gaining experience, and we may see much more substantial things in the future as we uncover more capabilities.

We've newly engaged with the product. We've only used it for a few months at this point. 

The solution is very stable. It's robust. The performance is excellent. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. The reliability is high. 

We'll continue with Azure Monitor.

It is a scalable solution. It's not a problem if you need to expand it. It reaches about 200 users right now. 

We do have access support and get it when we need it. We are satisfied. They are okay. 

We've also used New Relic. We moved away due to the cost. 

The solution is straightforward and very simple. It's not complex at all. We're effortlessly engaging with it. We implemented ten applications in one week.

Only two people are needed for deployment and maintenance. They are admins. 

We did not need to get the help of consultants or integrators. We handled the setup ourselves in-house. 

The licenses require a subscription based on the log file sizing.

The pricing is better than, for example, New Relic. New Relic was too costly for us. 

Based on what we see right now, I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. Maybe, as we use it more, we will rate it higher in the future. Currently, we are very new to using this product.