Introduction

Microsoft Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing platform, providing a wide variety of services you can use without purchasing and provisioning your own hardware. Azure enables the rapid development of solutions and provides the resources to accomplish tasks that may not be feasible in an on-premises environment. Azure's compute, storage, network, and application services allow you to focus on building great solutions without the need to worry about how the physical infrastructure is assembled. Some of the Azure services in the cloud computing platform is mentioned below:

• Compute services This includes Microsoft Azure Cloud Services (web and worker roles), Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Websites, and Azure Mobile Services.
• Data services This includes Microsoft Azure Storage (comprised of the Blob, Queue, Table, and Azure Files services), Azure SQL Database, and the Redis Cache.
• Application services This includes services that you can use to help build and operate your applications, such as the Azure Active Directory, Service Bus for connecting distributed systems, HDInsight for processing big data, the Azure Scheduler, and Azure Media Services.
• Network services This includes Azure features such as Virtual Networks, the Azure Content Delivery Network, and the Azure Traffic Manager.

An online management portal provides the easiest way to manage the resources you deploy into Azure. You can use this to create virtual networks, use cloud services, set up VMs, set up storage accounts, define websites, and so on. In order to deploy and manage the resources to the Azure portal, you would require a subscription.

Since many mission-critical applications these days are deployed on Microsoft Azure, the user experience with these applications depends upon the continuous availability and superlative performance of Microsoft Azure cloud platform. To ensure this, eG Enterprise now offers a specialized monitoring model for Microsoft Azure. This model provides in-depth insights into the health of a single subscription registered with the cloud platform, and in the process, proactively alerts administrators to potential issues that may cause performance bottlenecks, so that administrators can resolve the issues before end users start complaining.

Figure 1 : The layer model of Microsoft Azure

Each layer of Figure 1 is mapped to a variety of tests each of which report a wealth of performance metrics related to Microsoft Azure. Using these metrics administrators can find quick and accurate answers to the following queries:

• Is the Azure cloud available?
• How well the cloud responds to user requests?
• How many cores, storage accounts, cloud services, virtual and local network sites are monitored for each subscription ID?
• What is the current state of the storage account?
• Are the cloud services available? How many errors were encountered by the cloud services?
• What is the current state of each Azure database?
• How well the resources are utilized in the Azure databases?
• How many Azure databases are currently powered off, added, deleted etc?
• What is the current state of each Azure Virtual Machine?
• How many Azure virtual Machines were added, registered, powered on, powered off etc?
• Do the Azure Virtual machines have sufficient resources?
• How many errors are encountered by the Azure web sites and what is the current state of each Azure web site?