Azure Monitor Reviews

Azure Monitor is primarily used to monitor various aspects of Azure services and resources. It helps in tracking performance, detecting issues, and managing incidents related to cloud services. With Azure Monitor, there is no need to write specific code for monitoring purposes, as it automatically handles monitoring tasks and manages data related to cloud devices and services within Azure.

The most valuable functions of Azure Monitor for our clients are its ability to monitor CPU usage and detect any potential issues before they escalate into actual problems. This helps in proactively addressing issues and preventing disruptions in our services. Additionally, Azure Monitor's integration with Azure for implementation has been quite straightforward and easy to manage.       

I believe Azure Monitor is already a top-notch solution with excellent functionality and there is not much I would suggest for improvement. However, there is one limitation that certain features require payment, even for testing purposes, which can be a challenge. 

I have been using Azure Monitor for the past few years.

It is a stable solution as I haven’t encountered any issues.

It is a scalable solution.

I haven’t personally associated with the technical support from Azure Monitor as I work on the data and infrastructure side, where I haven't encountered any issues. The platform offers a wide range of capabilities for scaling up and managing data effectively.

As for comparing Azure Monitor with similar services from AWS, Microsoft prioritizes integration within its own ecosystem, which can lead to better functionality and response times compared to other platforms like AWS.

The deployment process of Azure Monitor is not overly complex since it is based on a cloud infrastructure. The process can vary from private to hybrid cloud setups, depending on your needs and configurations.

Regarding pricing, Azure Monitor is free with an Azure license, so there are no additional costs for using it.

I would overall rate it a seven out of ten.

Our company is a service integrator and we use the solution to monitor logs, metrics, and applications for customers. We have 200 users throughout our company. 

The tools for logs and metrics are pretty good and easy to use. We can do metric monitoring, log monitoring, and prepare queries to monitor something based on  customers' requirements.  

The Kusto query language is powerful and similar to SPL. We can do a lot of things with the language. 

The solution is very easy to use and maintain. 

Alerts cannot be configured to monitor at a certain point in time. For example, we might want to alert people at zero hours but that is not possible. Splunk can accomplish this and its alerts are far better than the solution's options. The alerting mechanism is not up to the market. 

The default interface should be improved. You can prepare your own dashboard by using custom query language, but the default interface is not good. 

I have been using the solution for almost three years. 

The solution is very stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

Technical support is good and very helpful. 

Support does have some limitations or challenges because they can only help with things they know. For example, we contacted them about an alert issue because we could not log off the solution's Event Hub component. Unfortunately, they were not able to help. 

Overall, support is very helpful and provides an immediate response. When they cannot help, it is a product issue. 

I have experience with Splunk, AppDynamics, BMC Proactive Document Management, Microsoft ACCM, New Relic, and Grafana. 

The setup was challenging initially because we were not familiar with the solution. Now that we have experience, everything is easy. 

We implemented the solution in-house.

Ongoing maintenance is performed by three members of our team. 

The solution is very costly because you have to pay for various things such as adding to logs and internet alerts. 

Logging costs are very high so should be lowered. Companies who log one TB or more will have very high costs. We should be able to log in a storage account to save costs.

Splunk is also very costly. 

The best solution depends on use cases.

AppDynamics or New Relic are the best products for application performance management.

Splunk is the best for logging and the solution is the second best. 

If you have a Microsoft environment, then you should use the solution as much as possible.

Azure Metrics is free and covers a lot of features. You can set it up and use it for monitoring.

You can definitely use the solution for logging but be aware that there are costs. 

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

Our main focus is on monitoring the utilization of resources, specifically within the ARRIS environment, where we utilize MySQL as the server. We actively track metrics such as CPU and memory utilization, as well as internet usage. The primary objective is to closely monitor resource utilization, providing insights that help us determine when adjustments to resource allocations are necessary.

One standout feature is its user-friendly dashboard. It simplifies the process of monitoring by providing a comprehensive overview of metrics, particularly in terms of resource utilization. The dashboard allows us to easily track various metrics and quickly understand the overall health of our system.

Establishing a threshold for resource utilization below 40% over a specified duration could trigger an automated scaling down, and vice versa. This way, the system could dynamically adjust configurations based on predefined conditions, such as scaling up or turning off resources. Enhancing and reaching a level of detail that facilitates pinpointing and addressing issues at such a refined level within the application and database components would be helpful.

We have been using it for one year.

We currently find it stable since our present requirements are relatively straightforward, and we are utilizing its basic functionalities.

The scalability is highly commendable with around three hundred users currently using it within our organization. The application we are employing primarily caters to the education sector. It is currently in use by the Ministry of Education, in conjunction with their division offices, and the plan is to extend its usage to the school level. Upon full implementation, we anticipate the user base to grow significantly, reaching an estimated range of twenty to thirty thousand users.

We have utilized Microsoft's Azure technical support services, both from the global cloud support and the local support team in the Philippines. Most of our technical support requests to Microsoft Azure have revolved around resource allocation issues. Initially, we deployed services across different regions, but we later consolidated in the Asian region. However, due to limited space in the Asian region, Azure imposes restrictions on certain resources.

We used New Relic. While Azure Monitor covers resource aspects, New Relic excels in providing a thorough examination of application issues. New Relic can precisely identify problems related to resource allocation, pinpointing issues within the application, whether they originate from application resources or the database.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We operate as a collaborative effort, partnering with Microsoft's education group, which supports the Ministry of Education. Under our agreement, we have an Azure expert within our team whom we can approach for support and assistance in implementation and deployment.

Since we are using the basic set, it is more cost-effective compared to other third-party APM solutions.

It is a more seamless and effective monitoring solution compared to third-party options like New Relic. The alignment of Azure Monitor with our Azure-based infrastructure simplifies the monitoring process, ensuring all applications and resources are easily accessible within the Azure ecosystem. While third-party APM solutions, such as New Relic or NetNix, are useful for troubleshooting specific issues, they face limitations when applied to Azure app services. These services often have restrictions and prerequisites that impede the full utilization of third-party APM for cloud monitoring, especially with the latest Azure technologies. Given these considerations, our recommendation is twofold. For those utilizing the latest Azure technologies, Azure Monitor is advised due to its seamless integration. If choosing a third-party APM provider, it's essential to confirm compatibility with the latest Azure technologies to ensure effective monitoring without encountering potential issues. Overall, I would rate it seven out of ten.

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.

I am monitoring all of my Azure Monitor and getting good reports. I can customize the reports to get the information I need. I am also getting emails about which AAS instances are down and everything in the system related to my services.

It is easy to use, scalable, and user-friendly. Microsoft has Many guides and videos to help you understand how to create and use Azure Monitor.

I have used multiple products like Webex and PRTG. Some features could be added. Azure Monitor should add SMS and APIs. We have very limited access to Azure Monitor. I usually get alerts on my phone when they are integrated with Slack.
I am not always available, but my team is. Sometimes, I am traveling and don't have access to my email, but I have Slack and other third-party projects that send me instant messages if a sensor goes down.

I have been using Azure Monitor as a customer for seven years. I have been working in my current company for the past year, but in my previous organization, we used Citrix and Azure Monitor to monitor the instances. 

The product is scalable.

We have almost 23 users, and the network security zone has four users using the solution. Currently, we are not planning to add usage.

The technical support team is good. Sometimes, there was a long waiting period. I've never faced any issues with Azure Monitor. If I’m deploying, I’m drafting a mail to the Microsoft team and receive the response after three days of purpose.

Positive

I faced many issues in my previous organization since I was a beginner in Azure, but I have no issues now. When implementing Citrix on-premises to Azure, we had some problems with adding sensors and SSL certificates.

If I have experience with Azure monitor, everything will come into word-of-mouth publishing. If I am satisfied with Azure monitoring, I will tell my colleagues in any previous organizations or anyone I’m connected with on LinkedIn.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine 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. 

We use it for proactive infrastructure monitoring. It's being used for monitoring the key metrics and availability of infrastructure.

We most probably use its latest version.

It's a Microsoft native tool, so it works well with other Microsoft technologies, which is predominantly what our customer end-user base is.

Automation is a key benefit of it as well. You can link one box to automatically resolve the issues off the back of another. There's quite a lot you can do with it.

The query builder could be better. In comparison to other monitoring tools, in order to use Azure Monitor, your engineers need to have KQL experience. If they don't, it's not intuitive as a system. They need to understand KQL and get the right queries to get the value that they want, whereas a lot of out-of-the-box solutions, such as FrameFlow and Datadog, can be given to somebody untrained, and the UI will guide them through what they need to do. You lose some customization with that, but you don't need to train people on it. It would be good if Microsoft had some form of query builder in place so that you can choose a metric and it writes the code for you. Some kind of AI elements would help with that skill gap for organizations.

Their support also needs to be improved. I've had a lot of issues with their support.

I've been using this solution for two years.

I've not had any issues with it so far. I'd rate it a ten out of ten in terms of stability.

You can scale it pretty easily. I'd rate it a nine out of ten in terms of scalability. 

We probably have about 30 people using this solution.

Their support is not great. We pay for Premier Support because we're a partner, and even that's pretty bad. I've had a lot of issues with their support. It has nothing to do with Microsoft Azure Monitor as a tool. I'd rate Microsoft's support for any of their systems at the absolute lowest number that I possibly can because it's pretty bad. The time to get engineers is an issue, and their skills and knowledge are also questionable. My team is more knowledgeable than them on some of the platform-related things.

They also make a lot of mistakes. They have brought the platform down a couple of times in recent months. There has been a whole heap of stuff. I've had quite lengthy conversations with our account manager about how poor the service is, and there isn't anything they're going to do about it because it's at the organizational level. It's not one team. It seems Microsoft is going through some struggles at the moment.

Negative

We used FrameFlow. We switched to being native. It's a Microsoft native tool.

The deployment duration depends on the use case. It depends on what you want. You don't deploy Azure Monitor itself. It's not like other tools where you have to install nodes and install the software and deploy it. It comes natively with Azure as a platform, so the implementation time is just dependent on what the client wants out of it. For our use case, we set up a template of about 15 to 20 key metrics that we monitor, which probably doesn't take longer than a day to deploy. It's all templated. We just run a bunch of CLI commands, and it deploys those templates, but if you have a customer who wants to start monitoring more intricate or complex things such as SQL databases and applications, you can probably spend months on it.

In terms of the number of people required, one person can do it if he or she has the skills for it.

I don't really measure return on investment. It's about visibility. It's about providing the service for us. If we compare the implementation versus the visibility we get, we do get a return. It doesn't take that long to deploy, but it can subsequently create a lot of visibility. So, its return on investment is probably okay.

Its cost depends on the ingestion of the logs. It could go anywhere. For an out-of-the-box platform such as FrameFlow, you pay pretty much a fixed price and you get what you get, whereas, with something like Azure Monitor, you pay by the ingestion charge, so you can have one client who pays hardly anything for the same alerts, and another client pays loads and loads. From experience, Azure itself isn't a cheap system. It's not a cheap tool at all. If you don't configure it correctly, it's really expensive. I'd rate it a nine out of ten.

I'd advise learning KQL before you think about it. If you know KQL, you can do a lot with it. If you understand KQL, then it's really powerful, and you can do a lot with it. If you don't understand it, you should probably steer away from it because you won't be able to do much. You won't get much value out of it.

I'd rate Azure Monitor a seven out of ten.