Azure Monitor Reviews

Azure Monitor is very good. We periodically monitor the performance of our database and servers, and we can manage that easily.

We have a lot of applications running, and we have asked our technical team to monitor their performance.

It is already integrated with many platforms. It has a lot of important export APIs, and GitHub is integrated. So, integration is not a problem with Azure Monitor.

What I like about Azure Monitor is that it performs well, is stable, and is easy to use.

We can see how much consumption is happening because it's linked to the payment. We want to know the data consumption for a period of time, and all this information is available there. It's used to monitor the data.

What I feel is when I open a screen of Azure, some places are very complex to navigate to. It is not very user-friendly when it comes to accessing certain sections. 

For example, finding the billing screen is not easy. Accessing the tabs can be complex because there is too much data on a single page.

So, it becomes difficult for someone who is not technically inclined to navigate.

So the UI could be improved.

It's been a few years, like two to three years.

At the end of the day, we have seen that it is more of a usage for us. We can monitor our applications and their performance.

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten.

Every time the version is updated, so it's scalable. Azure keeps on updating the solution, so it is very much scalable.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's a complete Azure cloud solution.

It is enabled by default. Once we deploy, we just have to trigger it. As long as we have the platform available, it comes as a default option with the subscription for Azure.

It comes with enablement already.

My team took less than an hour to set it up.

It's a very cost-effective solution. Since we are using Microsoft products, mainly built on .NET, it works very well. That's one advantage here. It's a very good ROI for us.

I have saved almost 50% of my costs compared to other cloud solutions. We are almost two years in, and we are paying every month. They are being billed, actually. We have a pay-as-you-go account. It is very good.

If we have more usage, you know, you have to pay more. If the usage is very low, for example, all my development servers are inside Azure, if my technical team is consolidating or developing the solution on their own desktop or laptop, they will not use the cloud servers. So, at that time, we are not being charged.

One thing that is actually very advantageous is that pay as you go is very helpful in curbing the cost.

Every month, we pay a licensing fee. It's cheaper. We used Google for a month or two, and it was very expensive. But when we changed the same solution to Azure, our costs were 50% less than what Google was charging us. From a pricing point of view, Azure is the cheapest.

AWS is now coming to us. They're ready to give us a solution for free for the next year. They're ready to give a free tenant to monitor our application. But at this point, we have been using Azure. It is very cost-effective compared to AWS and Google. Azure is much cheaper. It is a pay-as-you-go model. 

At the end of the day, I would say it's a very good product for us because we can monitor how our applications are performing. This is very important for us because it's our own application. 

We need to know its performance, collect data, visualize, and analyze. We can also improve our product based on the results we see from the monitor.

Any issues, we can go into the logs and trace them. We can do tracing as well. There are a lot of features.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

My recommendation:

If you use a Microsoft product, for example, if you are developing a product in .NET or other Microsoft products, you can use Azure. It's very scalable and works very well. There are many native applications in Azure Systems that can be utilized. 

For example, if you develop your backend in .NET and use an SQL database or even MongoDB, you can use Azure because it's a native competitor for Microsoft.

As an Azure solution architect, I am currently assisting a client who requires a quote for a report comparison between New Relic and Azure Monitor. Given my experience with Azure Monitor, my goal is to showcase its capabilities and potentially eliminate the need for New Relic in their environment.

Azure Monitor is primarily a web application that offers comprehensive monitoring capabilities for Azure resources. It encompasses various aspects, including logging and application insights. With Azure Monitor, you can configure alerts and rules based on specific conditions, such as triggering an alert when CPU usage exceeds 80%. The cost of alerts and notifications in Azure Monitor is relatively affordable, typically charging around 10 cents per alert per rule, allowing for a large volume of SMS notifications, such as up to a hundred thousand.

Comparatively, New Relic also offers cost-effective solutions. However, it is important to note that New Relic's pricing structure includes charges for user creation. Normal user creation can cost around $50, while admin users may incur a charge of approximately $99. 

On the other hand, when using Azure Monitor, if your organization already has an Azure subscription with Azure Active Directory (AD), you can leverage the existing user access and permissions, granting appropriate rights and access to the Azure portal as needed.

Among the valuable features of this solution, Application Insights stands out as one of the most significant. It provides insights into application performance and helps identify issues and bottlenecks. 

Azure Monitor offers a notification feature that enables proactive monitoring and alerting. This feature proves particularly useful in ensuring timely responses to critical events and maintaining overall system health.

In terms of pricing, Azure Monitor's billing based on data size can sometimes lead to increased costs, especially when developers need to purge data frequently.

While there are mechanisms in place to track and manage this, there is room for improvement in terms of optimizing data pausing and related processes.

Enhancements in this area could help mitigate potential billing concerns and provide a more seamless experience for users.

I have been working with Azure Monitor for three years.

I would rate the stability of Azure Monitor an eight and a half out of ten. It's pretty stable.

During the early years of 2017 or 2018, the server faced significant challenges in terms of flexibility and stability. However, in recent years, notable improvements have been made, resulting in a much more stable environment.

I would rate the scalability an eight and a half out of ten.

Overall, I find Azure Monitor to be quite impressive. It's worth noting that there may be some aspects I haven't explored yet since learning opportunities arise daily. However, based on my experience with the features I have utilized thus far, I am genuinely satisfied with Azure Monitor's performance and capabilities.

Azure Monitor is applicable to companies of all sizes, ranging from small to mid-size to enterprise-level organizations. However, it's important to exercise caution and use it wisely, as Azure can become costly if resources are used unnecessarily. By utilizing Azure Monitor efficiently, you can effectively manage costs, optimize licensing, and ensure that resources are allocated appropriately to maximize value. 

When anticipating high traffic on virtual machines or app servers, you have the flexibility to adjust memory usage and CPU utilization accordingly. This allows you to effectively manage resources based on varying traffic patterns. Additionally, if you need to track logs and gain insights into application behavior, utilizing Application Insights is recommended. However, it's important to consider the data retention period carefully. Storing data for seven or fifteen days strikes a balance between retaining necessary information and managing costs, as charges are based on the storage size in gigabytes (GB), which can be relatively expensive.

I would rate the technical support a nine and a half out of ten. 

The technical support provided for Azure services is highly commendable. Whenever a critical support ticket, such as a P1 level issue, is raised, the response is prompt and efficient. The support team promptly reaches out, assigns a dedicated engineer, and provides assistance to resolve the issue effectively. My personal experience with Azure technical support has been excellent.

The response time of Azure technical support is commendable. They have a system in place where you can create tickets based on the severity of the issue. If you designate a ticket as P1 (indicating the highest priority), they will promptly reach out to you, ensuring immediate attention and allocation of a dedicated engineer to resolve the matter efficiently.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Our focus is on migrating from an on-premises environment to Azure, as we aim to leverage the benefits of the public cloud. Given my extensive experience with Azure and multiple successful cloud projects, I can confidently say that Azure offers significant advantages in terms of cost-effectiveness, performance, and comprehensive services. 

By using Azure, we can consolidate all our requirements in one place, benefiting from the comprehensive suite of Microsoft offerings available within the Azure ecosystem.

As an Azure Solution Architect and Azure DevOps Engineer, my role revolves around overseeing and managing Azure solutions. I am responsible for designing and implementing Azure-based architectures, as well as ensuring the smooth operation of Azure DevOps processes.

As part of your project analysis, you are tasked with determining whether Azure Monitor or New Relic is better suited for your specific project requirements. This comparison will help you evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each solution and make an informed decision based on your client's needs and project background.

In our evaluation, our primary focus has been on comparing Azure Monitor with New Relic rather than considering other alternatives. Given my extensive experience with Microsoft technologies, particularly in Microsoft Azure, I aim to promote Azure and showcase its capabilities as a robust alternative to New Relic. My goal is to eliminate the reliance on New Relic and emphasize the value and benefits of leveraging Azure in our project.

In case you encounter numerous application issues, such as errors or performance concerns, Azure Monitor offers the solution of enabling Application Insights. This feature allows you to gain valuable insights into your application's behavior. Additionally, Azure Monitor provides the flexibility to create rules and set up alerts. With up to ten alerts per hour across ten distinct rules, you can effectively monitor and respond to critical events in a timely manner.

I would rate Azure Monitor an 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.

Azure Monitor is utilized for observability purposes, specifically for monitoring and alerting Azure states to customers.

Log analytics and log queries are the most valuable features of Azure Monitor.

We encounter some difficulties in monitoring the operating system on its own. Therefore, we require additional tools to obtain a comprehensive view of the entire application chain.

The technical support can be faster and has room for improvement.

The dashboarding and reports could benefit from improvements, as Microsoft seems to prioritize Power BI as their main dashboarding tool. Perhaps these enhancements could be integrated natively into Azure, as there is certainly room for improvement in that area.

I have been using the solution for seven years.

I give the stability a ten out of ten.

Azure Monitor is scalable.

The technical support is not always perfect. Sometimes it takes a long time to get the right person who actually understands the issue to work on the case.

We find the initial setup to be straightforward as we have extensive experience in it. However, configuring Azure Monitor may prove to be complex for those who are less experienced. The deployment takes about 30 minutes. The deployment process is using a CICD workflow that is fully automated.

The implementation was completed in-house. I work as an integrator and am responsible for implementing solutions for our customers.

There is a monthly fee for the alerts triggered and the data stored.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

We have 35 customers using the solution.

We have a small DevOps team of about ten developers that maintain this life cycle.

The reason for using this solution is to align with the hyperscaler's capabilities as close as possible, and this is the best-integrated solution we can find.

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. 

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.