Azure Monitor Reviews

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.

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 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.

We use this solution for basically everything. For example, we use it for infrastructure, application and resource monitoring.

It has good troubleshooting features like automated troubleshooting. It is also a flexible solution and a low-cost product. It includes all the features that are required for multi-cloud and public cloud.

If it is configured incorrectly, you can end up with a huge bill. Sometimes, a lot of data is collected and stored, and we may get charged for that kind of storage which is an issue.

We have been using this solution for more than two years and are currently using the latest version. It is a cloud-based solution and deployed on public cloud. Our cloud provider is Microsoft Azure.

It's stable and constantly updated with new features and functionalities.

It is scalable and can scale to any size. Five people use this solution in our organization, primarily administrators, DevOps and security personnel. It requires about two to three people for deployment and maintenance. We have dedicated people from the monitoring team that do this. We plan to expand the number of users eventually.

The technical support is quite responsive. Microsoft support is pretty good. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward and not complex. Deployment took a couple of days, and it was deployed in-house.

We have seen an ROI. It is a helpful tool and provides proactive information about the infrastructure.

We did not evaluate other options. Azure Monitor is one of the most non-native tools from Microsoft, and it's well-integrated.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. I recommend this solution to others. They should try Azure Monitor to see if it fits their requirements gradually. Additionally, there isn't a lot of upfront investment required to set it up.

The configuration could be improved in the next release because it takes a little time. However, they regularly update their scalability and features.

We use this solution for recording the logs and generating dashboards using Azure broad view insights. It is a great solution.

The solution should have cross-connection or cross-communication between tech partners. For example, it should be able to read the logs in the database and GCP environment by enabling a couple of hooks to collect information from cloud vendors to Azure Insights.

We have been using this solution for two years.

It is a stable solution. 

Azure Monitor is scalable, and we have not encountered any issues.

We have used Microsoft support for one or two usages regarding our area integrations. We already have some education with Microsoft Azure, and I believe a couple of engineers from Microsoft work on the technical support.

It is a move-in powerful feature compared to other market-leading tools. It has the capability to not only monitor your applications but also deliver dashboards. We can pinpoint different areas for improvement and it provides the ability to identify precisely what dash metrics are failing. It is introspective on contextual logging and delivers good dashboards. This helps senior management manage, alert, debug and look at operational insights.