Azure Monitor Reviews

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.

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.

I mainly use Azure Monitor to monitor my WordPress site for availability, performance, and error logs.

Azure Monitor provides visibility and proactive alerts, which means that if anything happens, I get automated alerts from the performance monitoring tool and can fix the problem.

Azure Monitor's best features are its graphs and charts, the different visibility options, and reporting.

Azure Monitor's integration with applications could be improved. There is limited support in terms of what it can monitor, and the connectors are built in a way that only monitors a specific area. In the next release, Azure Monitor should improve its visibility features, especially for WordPress websites.

I've been using Azure Monitor for over a year.

Azure Monitor is very stable - I'd rate its stability ten out of ten.

Azure Monitor is very scalable - I'd rate its scalability ten out of ten.

Microsoft's technical support is ok, but its response time is quite high, and you have to buy very expensive support to get a better response time.

Neutral

I previously worked with SolarWinds and ManageEngine, but both were developed for on-premise environments.

The initial setup was straightforward, and deployment took around thirty minutes. I would rate the process nine out of ten.

I implemented Azure Monitor myself.

Given its low price, Azure Monitor gives good ROI.

Azure Monitor's price is minimal to the point of being almost negligible. I would rate its pricing eight out of ten.

Azure Monitor is simple and cost-effective, but make sure that it can provide you with the information you're looking for, the right metrics, and what you need in advanced and application monitoring. I would give Azure Monitor a rating of seven out of ten.

As a Microsoft MVP and MCT, I help our company's clients use Azure Monitor in different ways depending on what types of activity they want to monitor. From a big picture perspective, this entails checking and testing both the performance and efficiency of cloud-based applications.

Starting from the basics, such as when monitoring VMs, you are able to integrate Azure Monitor with the virtual machine so as to create alerts and notifications that are automatically triggered when, for example, the machine's performance rises above 60-70%.

You can also use Azure Monitor to help you understand the total internal activity, including the CPU or RAM performance, of specific applications on the cloud. And beyond that, there are many other metrics detailing which users have logged in (or are concurrently logged in) to the application or VM, while showing the ratios of their activity in total.

For me, the best feature is the log analysis with Azure Monitor's Log Analytics. Without being able to analyze the logs of all the activities that affect the performance of a machine, your monitoring effectiveness will be severely limited.

Although it's not always the case, the price can sometimes get expensive. This depends on a number of factors, such as how many services you are trying to integrate with Azure Monitor and how much storage they're consuming each month (for example, how large are the log files?).

Of course, this totally depends on the particular customer's environment. As the implementer, we can typically only advise on the technical outcomes for a certain usage scenario of Azure Monitor, and not necessarily the advantages or disadvantages of paying for Azure Monitor in their particular use case. For example, if they are paying $400 per month, the advantages for the customer might be that they reduce technical headaches in ensuring proper service performance without having to invest in a separate IT member to handle the monitoring. And for many customers, this makes good business sense, which is why when we propose the use of Azure Monitor in such a way and give them an example, they often take us up on the proposal, despite the costs involved.

I have been using Azure Monitor for five years.

Azure Monitor is definitely a stable product once we have deployed it to our target. Azure Monitor, when deployed to a VM, will give you a stable interface for taking readings on various aspects of a machine's performance, such as what's going on with the CPU, memory, and data communications.

When it comes to more advanced usage with deeper monitoring, Azure Monitor can integrate with AI to make the process of advising what to do about resolving certain problems much easier.

Azure Monitor is a key part of service integration and it is easy to scale and extend as needed. You can also integrate other services, even third-party ones, with it.

It provides options for scaling it to your own needs in various ways, such as by providing a choice of what types of logs will be generated and how many days you would like to keep the logs for. It also provides options for how many servers you would like to monitor, and whether you will be logging on an hourly, per-minute, or per-second basis.

I am largely satisfied with how the technical support from Microsoft explains their solutions to the issues that we've raised. Although, most of the time, they simply share the most current link from their blog of knowledge base that explains the specific activity that must be done to resolve a problem. This is because Microsoft engineers don't actually provide the technical work themselves, but instead act as advisors, where companies like mine will then be the implementer of the suggested solutions.

The setup for Azure Monitor itself is easy to understand and, for generating logs and such, it's a simple process of configuring how you would like to gather your logs and for how long you would like to keep those records, etc.

It won't take anyone that much time to deploy their monitoring system with Azure Monitor. This is especially true if you understand your business needs well, because you can then quickly integrate Azure Monitor (and Log Analytics or Workbooks) inside your application as appropriate. As an estimate, it could take up to three or four hours at most.

We implement Azure Monitor in-house. Our deployment plan is to first obtain the Azure identity and then make an effort to better understand the service that will be running on the Azure cloud. For example, is it IaaS or PaaS? If it is based on PaaS, then we'll go straight to the application inside the PaaS, and if it's on a VM, then we'll go to the VM (or container) instance and set up the deployment from there. Here, the deployment also depends on the specific resources or Azure subscriptions in use.

Customers of Azure Monitor must pay an amount that depends largely on how many services they need to integrate and the storage space required in terms of logs, etc. If they only have a few small services to monitor, the price won't be too high, but on the opposite side of the spectrum, it can certainly get pricey.

Fortunately, customers can use the calculator provided by Azure to easily estimate the total monthly costs based on the customer's requirements. 

Along with Azure, I also have experience with New Relic, for which I have handled both deployment and connectivity.

I can definitely recommend Azure Monitor for most people, but before recommending it to all I would caution that whether you choose to use it depends largely on the type of service that you are running on the cloud.

One must first be clear about the outcomes of the service that is to be monitored; if it is a critical service or application where you absolutely must monitor each data point or watch for incidents, then you will certainly want to use Azure Monitor.

On the other hand, some companies are running services on the cloud that are not actually critical in the grand scheme of their operations, and to these companies I would not blindly encourage using Azure Monitor. Of course, if they are interested nevertheless, then I would say, sure, they can go forward with it as long as they understand that they will have to pay Microsoft accordingly in order to get something out of Azure Monitor. 

I would rate Azure Monitor an eight out of ten.

Azure Monitor can be used to monitor on-prem servers. You can install the agent on a server on-premise and you can pull out whatever telemetry you want. Additionally, you can install it on servers that are on the public cloud. It's similar to hybrid solutions. However, it depends on the use case. If there's a server on-premise, you deploy the server in AWS or GCP. If the server is on Azure itself, then it plugs directly in which is a hybrid setup.

Azure Monitor can be used if you are trying to look for how all the applications are tied together, such as application mapping. It helps to know what ports are open, what services are running on certain servers as one. 

We are able to monitor CPU utilization for specific servers to determine if they are running specific types of workloads or high resource utilization type workloads. We use Azure Monitor to be able to see if the server gets to a certain threshold, such as 70 percent CPU utilization, then send an alert to the operation center or reliability center to go look at it. They could then expand or increase the CPU resource there to fix the issue. The tool is used for monitoring purposes.

Azure Monitor has helped our organization to have insights into issues and informs us before an issue becomes a very critical stage. It provides us a baseline on how to prevent serious issues in the future. You don't want it to get to 90 percent usage, if you catch it at 70 percent, it helps preserve the lifespan of that sever or allow your services to keep running efficiently or effectively. It keeps the availability of whatever service that you're running on that server, is in check. This is one of the most important parts of the service.

Azure Monitor is useful because of the useful application insights and telemetry, such as metrics and logs.

Azure Monitor could improve the visualization aspect and integrate better with other third-party services.

I have been using Azure Monitor for approximately four years.

Azure Monitor is a stable solution.

The scalability of Azure Monitor is very good because it is on a public platform.

We have approximately 500 users using this solution. We are extensively using Azure Monitor and we are always adding to it.

The support we have received from Microsoft has been good. Depending on the issue you might be facing, they could respond within less than 24 hours during business hours.

The initial setup of Azure Monitor is straightforward. The process took us approximately one hour.

We did the implementation of Azure Monitor in-house.

The price of the solution is reasonable. 

I have evaluated Datadog before choosing Azure Monitor.

I rate Azure Monitor an eight out of ten.

I use the Azure Monitor in my company since it is a part of every solution we send to our customers. From a monitoring perspective, the use cases attached to the tool are enormous. Usually, my company uses it to monitor all Azure services that our customers use. My company also uses Azure Monitor if we want to monitor our customers' on-premises environment. In the case of any third-party cloud environment, my company suggests that customers have Azure Arc implemented in their environment. With it, they can monitor usage and monitoring while having one single dashboard for all their environments.

The solution's most valuable features are its ease of use and support for multiple environments. With the tool, the customer can have a single dashboard for all the environments.

The product should integrate well with other tools or clouds in the future, as it is one of the areas where the product currently has certain shortcomings.

I have experience with Azure Monitor.

It is a pretty stable solution.

It is a very scalable solution.

I am actively working with around 20 to 25 customers, and I know that the monitoring process is a part of every solution. As a part of our company's best practices, we provide a pitch associated with Azure Monitor to each and every customer.

The solution's technical support team is fast, knowledgeable, and customer-friendly.

I have experience with Azure Backup.

The product's initial setup phase is straightforward.

To have a simple monitoring system in place, I don't think it will take more than a day to enable it with the basic dashboards. If customers have a very unique requirement and need a dashboard of a specific type, then in such cases, it takes some time to develop the dashboard and publish the data. The deployment and time to create a dashboard can keep varying.

The solution is deployed on the cloud. The tool supports another cloud on-premises as well.

The product offers a pay-as-you-go model to users. The charges are to be paid according to the usage of the product.

Azure Monitor's integration capabilities make integrations very easy. The tool supports on-premises and other cloud environments.

I suggest that for each and every solution in place, one should have a monitoring tool because it is a crucial component of any solution.

I don't think that much about AI-related stuff when it comes to the tool since I don't think it would make much of a difference.

The value provided by the product stems from the fact that its customers can monitor their environment on a single dashboard and can look at areas like usage, triggers, and IOPS and CPU memory utilization. If there are any alerts, one can set certain triggers in the tool.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I use the solution to monitor the infrastructure and applications. 

I need connectivity with cost management. 

Azure Monitor's customer service is good. 

Positive

The tool is expensive. 

I rate Azure Monitor a nine out of ten. 

We use the solution to develop AI technology, particularly for financial services. It involves creating a chatbot or conversational AI system.

The solution's most valuable features are its ability to focus on delivery and maximizing the performance of applications and services.

The solution's monitoring feature has limitations for analyzing multiple metrics. Also, its support services could be better.

We have been a customer of AWS Monitor for less than a year.

It is a stable solution.

We have more than ten people using the solution.

The solution's technical support services need improvement.

The solution's initial setup was straightforward.

The solution is expensive, but it is worth the price.

You can use this technology, as it is unique to Microsoft's services. It focuses on performance monitoring. It is highly effective for diagnostic purposes, viewing metrics, and enabling/disabling logs. It facilitates data gathering and logging, as its name suggests.

I rate it an eight out of ten, as we had a great experience learning the technology.

Azure Monitor helps monitor resources to get alerts on the usage or incident's generation. One can also use it to log the events in the event's hub or analyze them through Azure Log Analytics workspace and SIEM tools available to analyze your resource utilization.

The logs, analytics, alerts, and Azure Log Analytics workspace are valuable features in Azure Monitor.

Improvement is a continuous process, and Azure Monitor should keep improving the solution per the evolving trend and technologies. The scalability could be improved as there are some limitations.

I have been using the solution for more than four years.

It is a stable solution. I rate its stability a nine out of ten.

It is a scalable solution but needs some improvement because of its policies.

Azure Monitor is useful at the enterprise level because it already has many resource monitoring solutions.

I rate its scalability an eight out of ten.

Technical support is good and helpful as the services they provide us are based on the SLA we have with them.

The initial setup is easy. Those who opt for Azure Monitor should use it as per needs. For example, one can use it to monitor resources, administrative operations, or log events. The solution was deployed on the cloud.

My company is okay with the current pricing of the solution.

I recommend the product to those planning to use it. I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

The solution is included in all of our solutions created with ISO. We always include Azure Monitor as the primary service to review the infrastructure state for our customers.

The most valuable feature is the universality of their functionalities in all Azure services, including, software solutions.

I would like more transparency when we use the solution with another environment, like on-premises, or on another cloud environment, like AWS or GCP.

What I would like to see in the next release is not directly related to the solution, but it depends on Azure cost management. Maybe if we had the opportunity to monitor the cost of Azure and another cloud in one environment, and maybe integrate that with Azure Monitor, that would be incredible and amazing for any IT company to offer that to our customers.

I have been using the solution for almost four years.

The licensing is a monthly fee.

I give this solution a nine out of ten.