Azure Monitor Reviews

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.

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.

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.

We use Azure Monitor as our alert system. We also use it for other types of measurement.

Currently, we use Power BI for our data visualization, and Azure Monitor is a very good fit with those cases. Another thing I like about the solution is that we can easily export the data, and the tool seamlessly works together with Datadog, though in terms of visualization in Azure Monitor, it's not as beautiful. It also doesn't have as many features as Power Bi, and this is why we were comparing it with Datadog.

We use Power BI because it has many features, so that's the main part we consider when selecting which tool to use. As for Datadog, people think of it as an application performance monitoring tool, rather than a data exporting tool, so they will still use Azure Monitor for exporting data. In some cases when the data analyst team needs some type of data, we can set that up for them on Azure Monitor, then consider using Datadog as a platform monitor.

Visualization in Azure Monitor needs improvement. Adding more features to it would also make the solution better.

My experience with Azure Monitor is six months.

Azure Monitor is a stable tool.

Azure Monitor is scalable, but the only downside to it is that it's not an out-of-the-box (OOTB) solution, so we cannot scale it to something outside of Azure ServiceNow. Currently, we use ServiceNow as a ticketing system, then use Datadog as the incident and alert system to trigger a ticket in ServiceNow, which we cannot do in Azure Monitor.

Azure Monitor is a low-priced solution.

We evaluated Datadog.

I was comparing Datadog and Azure Monitor. We had a POC for Datadog and we were trying to test it with the trial account for our current data solution in Azure, so we tried to measure the differences between the two solutions.

Now we use Azure Monitor for our alerts and other measurements, but not as an application performance monitoring tool, so we're considering Datadog for that purpose. They made the final decision to use Datadog for application performance monitoring.

We are not in the setup phase for Azure Monitor yet, because we're still doing a POC for visibility, so we still have no idea on whether it'll be complex or straightforward to set up the tool.

As we are very small, we have not had the chance to contact tech support for this solution, plus we have a dedicated team from Microsoft who handles our questions and issues. Currently, we don't have an issue on Azure Monitor, but have raised issues about other Microsoft solutions, and the Microsoft dedicated team have been very supportive.

My advice to others looking into implementing Azure Monitor is that if they're working on small-scale projects and their projects fit Azure, then Azure Monitor will be the best solution for them, particularly because it is low-priced. The tool is also good when building a solution, e.g. they won't need to explore outside of it, but if they're building a multi-cloud solution, and they have a mix of on-premises and cloud, my suggestion is for them to use Datadog.

I will rate Azure Monitor a seven out of ten, because this solution has two things that we don't like, e.g. it doesn't tell you what and how it happened. It just says: "Hey, that happened", and "Go and check it". This is the reason why I don't recommend Azure Monitor, e.g. it's not a very informative tool, so we don't use it for our root cause investigation.

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.

We primarily use the solution for Application Insights logging, Database logging, etc. We also use it to analyze charts on the dashboard to get an overview of the issues found in the logs. The solution helps us in monitoring, analytics, and logging.

With the solution's help, we can detect database performance issues, like which tables are missing in the indexes on some columns, etc. It helps us monitor timeout in the database, such as performance issues of the queries. If the queries timeout in five minutes, we can analyze the problem with the help of Application Insights. We can detect the problem of a specific step or reason responsible for letting the application fail or crash. For example, if the application crashes during Selenium's end-to-end test on the UI, we can find the reason by going through the logs.

The solution has tons of valuable features.

They should include advanced logging on the database level in the Azure pool. Presently, we are not able to catch the transaction logs. The preview mode is available only for dedicated SQL servers and not for a database pool. They should improve this particular area of the solution. 

They should add a built-in feature for tracing the request and responses. Currently, it does not get measured automatically, and we need to write down the custom solution to check the request and the responses in the logs. They should create a log utility to log the request and send it to the Application Insights in the integration as a custom attribute. 

There should be default parameters and headers, which we can customize. It'll be beneficial because, at present, we only have responses, but not the requests. It is the solution's downside.

We have been using the solution for six years.

I rate the solution's stability as a five for the European region and ten for other regions.

I rate the solution's scalability as a ten.

A part of the setup process was straightforward. At the same time, a part of the process required some guidance because the Azure monitor evolves constantly. Most of the time, the blog post or guidance article on how to set up gets outdated quickly. Sometimes many things don't work as expected or as written in the Microsoft documentation.

If you have a solution built on Microsoft technology, go for Azure Monitor. I rate it as a nine out of ten.