3 Tips for Designing a Logging and Monitoring Solution on Azure
Are you tired of digging through heaps of data to determine why your Azure compute resources are failing? Or is your boss nagging you to create an early warning system for your Azure subscriptions?
Did you land on this article because you need to study for the Microsoft AZ-305 exam? Whatever your reasoning for reading this post, we have three amazing hot tips for designing a logging and monitoring solution on Azure.
(Pssst … if you need help studying for the AZ-305 exam to earn the Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification, check out Knox Hutchinson’s course at CBT Nuggets.)
Ready to Build Monitoring and Logging Solutions in Azure?
These tips will help you start creating monitoring solutions in Azure. Still, if you want to take it a step further, I recommend Knox Hutchinson’s Azure Solutions Architect Expert AZ-305 online course. Mr. Hutchinson dives deep into Azure services, covering topics like data governance and authentication, data ingestion and integration, disaster recovery, and utilizing Azure for high availability.
As a bonus, you’ll learn everything necessary to prepare for the AZ-305 Microsoft exam. Take the course.
Not a CBT Nuggets subscriber? Sign up for a one-week, no-strings-attached trial to check out this course and others!
Configure Intelligent Alerts in Azure
Azure’s monitoring services include robust alerting tools. These alerting tools can integrate with both Azure Metrics and Azure Logs. By default, most Azure services integrate with Metrics and Logs, and that data can be piped to the Alerts product.
Alerts are helpful for all sorts of things. For example, suppose an Azure-hosted VM powers a web server, which is flooded with traffic and spikes CPU, memory, or network traffic usage. In that case, Alerts can send real-time notifications to the cloud ops team for investigation.
Likewise, Alerts can be configured to push billing notifications. Systems administrators have posted many horror stories online about incurring enormous fees from cloud service providers. Rogue Google or Facebook bots got stuck looping through their website. Those bots pushed tens of thousands of requests to their API, pushing their egress traffic (and, as such, costs) through the roof. Those bots accidentally simulated a DDoS attack, and the businesses paid for it.
Configulate alerts for every possible doomsday scenario in Azure. It only takes a few minutes.
Simplify Cross-Department Communication with Power BI
You can take full control of your data analytics solution at the largest possible scale using Microsoft Power BI and tools available in Microsoft Azure. A bonus: Management loves it!
One of the most incredible Azure monitoring services features is Workbooks, a reporting tool that uses complex custom configurations (pre-defined or self-defined complex telemetry queries). Workbook data can also be piped into Power BI.
Management is not responsible for understanding technical language and concepts; that responsibility falls on IT. Sometimes, cloud solutions architects need help conveying technical information to nontechnical stakeholders.
Piping data into Power BI dashboards solves two issues:
Power BI helps explain technical data and trends to nontechnical team members.
Power BI gives agency to nontechnical team members, helping them to understand IT operations and technical debt without requiring lectures from IT staff. That way, everyone stays on the same page.
Related: How Difficult is the AZ-305 Exam?
Secure Your Cloud with Azure Data Explorer
You can leverage Azure AI for security, specifically Microsoft's Data Explorer products in Azure, which have access to Microsoft’s ML platform.
One of Azure Data Explorer's core use cases is data discovery. It can ingest large data repositories (structured or unstructured), analyze them, and spit out human-readable content. The ML models that Data Explorer uses are trainable, so security-related data can be piped into Data Explorer for analysis and raise alerts if an anomaly is found.
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