Monitoring and Logging with Azure Monitor

Monitoring and Logging with Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor is the platform for collecting, analyzing, visualizing, and acting on telemetry. Metrics provide efficient numeric time series, Log Analytics stores queryable logs, and Application Insights adds application performance, dependency, trace, and user telemetry.

Core ideas

• A diagnostic setting routes supported platform logs and metrics to destinations such as Log Analytics, Storage, or Event Hubs.
• Kusto Query Language (KQL) transforms and analyzes records in a Log Analytics workspace.
• Metric alerts evaluate numeric series; log-search alerts evaluate query results.
• Application Insights supports distributed tracing and application service-level indicators.

Design and operating model

Define user-centered objectives, instrument applications, enable resource diagnostics, choose workspace boundaries, set retention, and build actionable alert rules. Each alert needs an owner, severity, routing, runbook, and recovery condition. Use workbooks or dashboards for shared operational views.

Example

AppRequests
| where TimeGenerated > ago(30m)
| summarize Requests=count(),
            Failures=countif(Success == false),
            P95=percentile(DurationMs, 95)
  by bin(TimeGenerated, 5m)
| order by TimeGenerated asc

Run examples in a disposable training subscription. Replace names, Regions, identifiers, scopes, sizes, and policies with reviewed values, and confirm current Azure CLI and service requirements before production use.

Production guidance

• Control ingestion with useful schema and sampling, but preserve security and audit evidence.
• Avoid alerting on every transient event; use sustained symptoms and dependency risks.
• Monitor the monitoring path itself, including agent health, diagnostic settings, action groups, and retention.

The chapter quiz follows the lesson and checks both service vocabulary and architecture decisions.