AZ-303 Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies – Monitor Azure Infrastructure

1. Monitoring Azure

With any solution, it’s important to be able to monitor the various components you use, not only for troubleshooting problems, but also to be alerted of performance or security issues. Many companies must also be able to demonstrate comprehensive auditing capabilities for compliance and security reasons. Azure provides a range of monitoring tools to achieve these tasks and more.

Originally, many of these monitoring capabilities were distinctly separate. However, Microsoft are slowly bringing them all together into a single to cohesive suite. Generally speaking, monitoring uses two main components to achieve this metrics and logs. Metrics are continual real time data flows that provide information about the health and performance of your components.

Logs are longer term records of health and events over time that can be queried and used to help resolve issues and highlight key trends between them. They provide insights and help visualize, analyze and respond to events in Azure as well as resource health. Azure’s monitoring tools also help control costs in Azure by enabling these tools to provide not just a snapshot of current costs, but a full range of reporting capabilities, including cost forecasts based on currently deployed components.

All this information from costs, logs, and metrics can then be brought together into customizable dashboards that can be configured to display the most important information to your team. Individual dashboards can be configured for different capabilities depending on the needs of the team. So, for example, a dashboard for networking components can be created for the network work team and virtual machine performance metrics for an infrastructure team, or maybe even a cost dashboard for finance teams.

2. Monitoring Costs Walkthrough

Over the next few lectures we’ll start looking at the various options available to us with reporting. The first we’ll look at something that’s probably quite important, which is cost analysis. The first thing we need to do is from your home page we need to navigate subscriptions and from here we’ll be able to see the subscriptions we have. Straight off the bat, we can see here what our current cost is for this subscription and the fact that it’s active. What we want to do is drill into that and then we’ll just minimize this here to give us a bit more space. And the subscription details, first of all gives us some details around some immediate costs so we can see our recent charges and our top services by cost. So straight away we get to see some granular details.

And if we click onto each of these we’ll start going to more details around that. If we scroll a bit further down we get a forecast cost. So based on our current usage, ie. The services that we’ve currently got provisioned and running, we can see here what our estimated cost is over the next billing period. Finally, while you want the free service, or in your first twelve months, you get to see the free services available to you and what capacity you’re using so that you can get a good idea of whether you’re going to exceed any of those capacities or not down the left hand side. Now let’s go to cost analysis. So within the cost analysis area, this is a bit more like the rest of the monitoring functions that you’ll see in the shower. We could see some basic details here. So we’ve got a chart.

Again, this is the forecast that we saw earlier. And then if we go down here we get to see these groupings for each of the different areas. What we can do with these is if we hover over them, we get to see our cost broken down. First of all by resource group. We can also look at location and again by the top five services. What we can actually do is click on one of these. So for example, we could take our greatest cost resource group and click on it and that will reload the chart. But this time we’ll have a filter applied resource group for the filter which allows us to break down. Again, it’s a similar view, but now we’re seeing this just for this resource group.

So if you have high costs and you want to understand what is creating those costs, that’s a great way to be able to drill down into what it is. We can, of course up here at our own filters by various different options. So you can go by part number, pricing model and so on, and have a play with those to see what different options we have. If you want rid of the filter, simply click the X and that will get rid of it. We could also change some other options here. So for example, the default view is accumulated costs. Again, we can actually go down to daily costs and Cost by Resource, which again just gives us some more granular views. Note that when we’ve gone to Cost by Resource, what it’s added along here.

So it’s added as a group by which is resource and set as a granularity and it’s changed from a chart to a table. So through these we can actually change how these are displayed. So again, we could save this by, for example, meter name and we can even change the granularity. So again, we could set that to monthly. And by playing with these you can get as many different kinds of reports as you like. Let’s just change the meter back to Resource first of all. And what we can now do actually is we can export this list. The simplest is we could download it as a CSV file.

So this is useful if you want to be able to do more analysis on your cost, for example in Excel and so on. So we can pull down this data and do what we want. What we can also do when we click the export is actually tell it to schedule an export. So this is useful if you wanted to have a monthly export. So we could go to schedule here and then we can make it export it to a storage account, give it a container name and a direct way and that will automatically give us an export of those costs that you could then provide access to your billing department or your finance department. So through these building tools we get a lot of cost analysis that we can use to help us keep track of things and make sure the dog get out of hand.

3. Alerts and Metrics

For realtime monitoring of performance on Azure components. Azure metrics can provide information on a range of data points dependent on the service being monitored. Components provide the view most commonly used metrics on the overview page. However, custom views can also be created via the metrics played of each individual component or via a Set central metric blade that can be used to report across components. Either way, a powerful filtering capability combined with a number of different visualizations enable you to create the views you need. These can then be saved up into dashboards for easy viewing. There are three fundamental sources of metrics platform metrics are created by Azure resources and give you visibility into their health and performance. Each type of resource creates a distinct set of metrics without any configuration required.

Guest OS metrics are collected from the guest operating system of a virtual machine. Enable guest OS metrics for Windows or virtual machines with the Windows Diagnostics extension and for Linux virtual machines with the influx data telegraph agent. Application metrics are created by App Insights for your monitored applications and help you detect performance issues and track trends in how your application is being used. And finally, customer metrics are metrics that you can define in addition to the standard metrics that are automatically available. Alerts proactively notify you when important conditions are found on your monitoring data.

They allow you to identify and address issues before the users of the system themselves notice them. Alerts consists of alert rules, action groups and monitor conditions. Alert rules are separate from alerts and the actions are to take and when an alert fires. The alert rule captures the targets and criteria for alerting. The alert rule can be in an enabled or disabled state alerts only fire when enabled. The key attributes of an alert rule are the target source, the signal which are emitted by the target source the criteria ie. A combination of signal and logic applied to a target. So, for example, if CPU percentage is over a certain threshold, a specific name for the alert rule to be configured, an optional description for the alert, which can range from zero to four, and an action that will be taken when the alert is fired.