Azure Monitor

What is Azure Monitor?

Azure Monitor is Azure's native monitoring tool that can monitor your applications hosted on Azure and the Azure infrastructure. Azure Monitor can be to get useful dashboards and reports, but setting up the monitoring can be time-consuming and challenging. Manual setup is needed, and admins need to specify each metric and threshold. Furthermore, there is a cost per metric and even based on the type of threshold.

This is where a third-party Azure monitoring tool like eG Enterprise helps. It is simple to setup, licensing is not per metric and you can even monitor multi-cloud deployments from a central console.


The importance of Monitoring Azure

As enterprises grow, so do the number and complexity of their cloud applications and the resources required to run them. Over time, control and visibility become paramount to the IT professionals who keep the organization running.

Monitoring Azure isn’t an option for those who want to ensure maximum uptime, health, and performance to protect sensitive data and avoid risking the business’s bottom line. It’s a necessity.

Monitoring Azure grants comprehensive and correlated visibility of all cloud-based applications, virtual machines, and SQL databases. When collecting and analyzing data from target resources to gain crucial insights, you effectively assess systemwide health based on your chosen key performance indicators and plan for future capacity needs.

However, the importance of monitoring Azure extends far beyond visibility. You can measure the performance of all Azure-hosted applications to find and fix the root causes of issues. At the same time, the monitoring insights gleaned can be used for right-sizing cloud instances, for optimizing cost, for planning growth, etc.

Early action is essential to achieve effective maintenance and steady uptime. That is why it is critical to monitor Azure through native or third-party applications.

This allows you to receive real-time notifications to take action before minor problems begin to impact security and productivity. After alerting your team to an issue, a good monitoring solution automates a quick resolution by triggering a remedy process.


Benefits and disadvantages of Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor does have its benefits. It is a native monitoring tool for all Azure cloud-based applications and provides a central source of truth for performance and health data via its dashboard. With the included reporting features, IT professionals can have the data needed to keep tabs on their preferred KPIs.

However, it’s important to note that Azure Monitor is very laborious to set up. The out of the box capabilities are limited and not automated. Pricing is also per metric and per threshold configured. Getting the reports you need requires one to write Kusto queries. All of these are the reasons why IT admins are looking for simpler, lower cost, easier to deploy alternatives like eG Enterprise.


Azure Monitor alternatives

Azure Monitor is not the only solution for monitoring cloud-based services, applications, and databases. While Azure Monitor gives you insights into the resources in use by different cloud instances, you may need to make use of other add-on modules of Azure Monitor for monitoring application instances.

With eG Enterprise and other specialized monitoring tools, you don’t need any add-on modules to monitor applications on Azure. Furthermore, if your business operates in a multi-cloud or hybrid environment (such as one that uses AWS and Azure), a third-party monitoring tool like eG Enterprise is the way to go. You won’t have to configure thresholds and alerts manually, and you’ll be able to keep your costs to a minimum since you will not be paying per metric.