Azure Performance Monitoring

How does the Azure monitor tool in SAM work?

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) includes Azure monitoring templates that use real-time SNMP, UDP, TCP, WMI, and WinRM calls to collect valuable information about the performance of Azure applications and servers. Access to this data can help you gain a more thorough picture of server and application performance and troubleshoot performance issues across your Azure environment more effectively.

As a comprehensive Azure monitor, SAM is designed to provide a range of capabilities, including Azure virtual machine monitoring, Azure IoT Hub monitoring, Azure Service Bus monitoring, and Azure application monitoring capabilities.

Why is monitoring Microsoft Azure important?

Microsoft Azure is a large and intricate platform, with hundreds of cloud-based products and services that allow organizations to build, manage, and deploy their applications. Monitoring Azure servers, Azure cloud services, and Azure applications can be difficult and time-consuming—even with Azure monitoring tools made by Microsoft. Using a comprehensive third-party Azure monitoring tool is important for ensuring your Azure environment’s infrastructure and services are running properly, reducing bottlenecks and downtime, and allocating your resources more effectively.

Investing in Azure environment monitoring can help you:

• Troubleshoot performance problems: Performance issues can impact the end-user experience and reduce productivity. Pinpointing bottlenecks, availability, and capacity issues can be challenging when you’re responsible for monitoring your organization’s Azure SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS services. Investing in a powerful Azure performance monitoring tool helps give you a deeper understanding of your entire Azure environment at any given moment, better allowing you to get to the root cause of performance issues quickly and minimize downtime.

• Allocate your resources more effectively: Many Azure applications and services operate on a pay-as-you-go pricing model, making Azure cost monitoring a high priority. Resource allocation can be needlessly challenging when you don’t use an Azure monitoring tool and can’t visualize your Azure environment at a high level or access detailed data. Using an Azure application monitoring tool for Azure cost monitoring and resource consumption monitoring helps take the guesswork out of resource allocation. With the up-to-date data and detailed reports a comprehensive Azure monitor provides, you’ll know exactly where optimization opportunities are, allowing you to put your time, personnel, and money to their best use.

By using a powerful Azure monitoring tool for key tasks—including Azure Service Bus monitoring, Azure usage monitoring, Azure virtual machine monitoring, and Azure service monitoring—you can gain a better picture of your entire Azure environment and optimize its performance.

What are Azure monitor metrics?

Collecting, tracking, and analyzing Azure monitor metrics can help give you a deeper understanding of your Azure environment, so you can detect issues quicker and make more effective, data-driven decisions. Using a comprehensive Azure monitoring tool can help you track key metrics, including:

• Throughput
• Average CPU utilization
• Average IO utilization
• Incoming and outgoing bytes
• Internal server errors
• Number of blocked, failed, and successful connections

Microsoft offers first-party Azure service monitoring tools like Azure Monitor, Azure Monitor Metrics, and Azure Monitor Logs. Azure Monitor tools collect metrics, logs, and performance data from Azure resources, applications, and virtual machine agents and store the metrics in a time-series database. However, you may need to switch between different monitoring tools within the Azure portal to view these insights.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Azure monitor is designed to provide in-depth, up-to-date metrics and user-friendly dashboards to help you monitor your Azure environment in a central location. SAM makes collecting, viewing, and analyzing critical Azure performance metrics easier by offering unified dashboards and contextual insights alongside other monitoring metrics. With performance monitoring capabilities for over 1,200 systems and applications and end-to-end visibility, SAM enables users to monitor their entire IT environment and ensure the health and performance of their applications and servers from a single pane of glass.

What is Azure IoT?

Powerful and scalable, Azure IoT (Internet of Things)—a group of cloud services managed by Microsoft—offers new and experienced cloud developers useful services and tools for developing IoT solutions. These IoT solutions consist of one or more IoT devices that communicate with cloud-based back-end services to receive, process, store, and analyze telemetry data, send commands to specific devices, monitor device activities, and manage device firmware.

Though Azure IoT infrastructure, middleware, and operating system are fully managed by Microsoft, it’s important to monitor your Azure IoT Hub to understand what devices and services are connected to your IoT Hub and pinpoint root causes of performance issues. However, Azure IoT Hub monitoring can be challenging and involve manually compiling and analyzing IoT Hub performance metrics and Azure Service Bus monitoring insights from disparate sources.

SAM Azure monitoring includes a dedicated template for tracking Microsoft Azure IoT Hub performance in one location, so you can more easily monitor various key elements, including:

• Commands: People interact with IoT devices remotely by sending commands. Unfortunately, not all commands are completed. The template for Azure IoT Hub monitoring included in SAM is built to collect data on each command’s status, allowing you to see how many cloud-to-device commands were completed, abandoned, or rejected, giving you insights into potential performance issues.

• Messages delivered to Service Bus Queue endpoints: While SAM has a separate Azure Service Bus monitoring template, you can also monitor the messages delivered to Service Bus Queue endpoints with the Azure IoT Hub monitoring template in SAM. By engaging in Azure Service Bus monitoring, you can gain insight into Azure Service Bus and Azure Service Bus queries, detect trends, and resolve issues quickly.