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.

I am not using the product by myself. I recommend the tool to our customers. Our company's customers use Azure Monitor in their DevOps practices since it offers easy-to-monitor components. Usually, we augment the product since DXC has its own tool. In our company, we also deploy our own tools on Dynatrace. We also have our own set of tools called DXC Platform X, which gets deployed to the cloud, and the native cloud tools like Azure Monitor are augmented by our own tool.

I don't know what specific features the customer gets from the tool. I know the standard monitoring is done on Azure Monitor. In our company, aside from being active with the setup, we also take care of the notification setup so that the help desk and right people are alerted in case there is an issue.

It is not just Azure Monitor that my company deals with since we augment it with our own DXC Platform X, which DXC developed for the cloud. DXC Platform X has its own set of tools for the cloud.

It would be good if there could be an integration between Azure Monitor and Azure Arc. The integration between Azure Monitor and Azure Arc can create a different product. Using Azure Monitor and Azure Arc separately to monitor different environments can be complicated. I think there is a need to blend everything into one product so that you can monitor everything, like the on-premises, AWS or Azure with one tool.

I have been using Azure Monitor for more than two years.

The tool's pricing is very good. I could say that Microsoft offers different cost models, which are listed on the product's website. It starts free of cost and goes up to a certain level, and then one just needs to pay above that. Usually, clients don't have to pay to choose anything, which is the biggest advantage of the hosting model.

The tool is a native product of Azure. Some good integration capabilities are present in the tool. It also offers availability, and the tool's pricing is very good.

I rate the tool 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. 

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.

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.

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.

I use Azure Monitors and Azure monitoring to monitor our applications.

It is used for balancing how your servers are working and how your servers are responding to the end user in the form of your inputs and output responses, your gate input responses and post request, and how your server is working about the workload, et cetera. We can monitor all of this by using Azure monitoring tools. There are some application insights also that we can use to put in more detailed metrics as related to the logs and the failure of the servers, and downtime, et cetera.

We like the monitoring. We can look for the downtimes and look at the log to see whenever there is a crash and all the information around it.

It's very straightforward to set up.

The solution is stable.

You can scale the product.

The pricing is less than Dynatrace.

They need to work with other cloud providers - not just Azure. We'd like them to work with clouds such as GCP, AWS, and Alibaba, for example. 

I've used the solution for quite a long while, however, recently we moved from on-premise to the cloud. 

It's quite stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The solution is scalable.

I've never used technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they would be. 

We are moving our applications to Azure Web Apps.

Earlier we used Dynatrace, however, it was quite costly.

The solution is very straightforward. It's very easy to implement. 

We can use different services by Azure, such as virtual machines or Web Apps. These are all quite frequently deployed and it's not difficult. 

We handle the initial setup in-house. 

I'm not concerned about the pricing. Actually that is handled by a different team.

It is a pay-as-you-go service. We pay as needed.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. A centralized team handles that aspect.

I'd recommend the solution to others. 

I'd rate the product eight out of ten.

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.