Azure Monitor Reviews

As a Microsoft MVP and MCT, I help our company's clients use Azure Monitor in different ways depending on what types of activity they want to monitor. From a big picture perspective, this entails checking and testing both the performance and efficiency of cloud-based applications.

Starting from the basics, such as when monitoring VMs, you are able to integrate Azure Monitor with the virtual machine so as to create alerts and notifications that are automatically triggered when, for example, the machine's performance rises above 60-70%.

You can also use Azure Monitor to help you understand the total internal activity, including the CPU or RAM performance, of specific applications on the cloud. And beyond that, there are many other metrics detailing which users have logged in (or are concurrently logged in) to the application or VM, while showing the ratios of their activity in total.

For me, the best feature is the log analysis with Azure Monitor's Log Analytics. Without being able to analyze the logs of all the activities that affect the performance of a machine, your monitoring effectiveness will be severely limited.

Although it's not always the case, the price can sometimes get expensive. This depends on a number of factors, such as how many services you are trying to integrate with Azure Monitor and how much storage they're consuming each month (for example, how large are the log files?).

Of course, this totally depends on the particular customer's environment. As the implementer, we can typically only advise on the technical outcomes for a certain usage scenario of Azure Monitor, and not necessarily the advantages or disadvantages of paying for Azure Monitor in their particular use case. For example, if they are paying $400 per month, the advantages for the customer might be that they reduce technical headaches in ensuring proper service performance without having to invest in a separate IT member to handle the monitoring. And for many customers, this makes good business sense, which is why when we propose the use of Azure Monitor in such a way and give them an example, they often take us up on the proposal, despite the costs involved.

I have been using Azure Monitor for five years.

Azure Monitor is definitely a stable product once we have deployed it to our target. Azure Monitor, when deployed to a VM, will give you a stable interface for taking readings on various aspects of a machine's performance, such as what's going on with the CPU, memory, and data communications.

When it comes to more advanced usage with deeper monitoring, Azure Monitor can integrate with AI to make the process of advising what to do about resolving certain problems much easier.

Azure Monitor is a key part of service integration and it is easy to scale and extend as needed. You can also integrate other services, even third-party ones, with it.

It provides options for scaling it to your own needs in various ways, such as by providing a choice of what types of logs will be generated and how many days you would like to keep the logs for. It also provides options for how many servers you would like to monitor, and whether you will be logging on an hourly, per-minute, or per-second basis.

I am largely satisfied with how the technical support from Microsoft explains their solutions to the issues that we've raised. Although, most of the time, they simply share the most current link from their blog of knowledge base that explains the specific activity that must be done to resolve a problem. This is because Microsoft engineers don't actually provide the technical work themselves, but instead act as advisors, where companies like mine will then be the implementer of the suggested solutions.

The setup for Azure Monitor itself is easy to understand and, for generating logs and such, it's a simple process of configuring how you would like to gather your logs and for how long you would like to keep those records, etc.

It won't take anyone that much time to deploy their monitoring system with Azure Monitor. This is especially true if you understand your business needs well, because you can then quickly integrate Azure Monitor (and Log Analytics or Workbooks) inside your application as appropriate. As an estimate, it could take up to three or four hours at most.

We implement Azure Monitor in-house. Our deployment plan is to first obtain the Azure identity and then make an effort to better understand the service that will be running on the Azure cloud. For example, is it IaaS or PaaS? If it is based on PaaS, then we'll go straight to the application inside the PaaS, and if it's on a VM, then we'll go to the VM (or container) instance and set up the deployment from there. Here, the deployment also depends on the specific resources or Azure subscriptions in use.

Customers of Azure Monitor must pay an amount that depends largely on how many services they need to integrate and the storage space required in terms of logs, etc. If they only have a few small services to monitor, the price won't be too high, but on the opposite side of the spectrum, it can certainly get pricey.

Fortunately, customers can use the calculator provided by Azure to easily estimate the total monthly costs based on the customer's requirements. 

Along with Azure, I also have experience with New Relic, for which I have handled both deployment and connectivity.

I can definitely recommend Azure Monitor for most people, but before recommending it to all I would caution that whether you choose to use it depends largely on the type of service that you are running on the cloud.

One must first be clear about the outcomes of the service that is to be monitored; if it is a critical service or application where you absolutely must monitor each data point or watch for incidents, then you will certainly want to use Azure Monitor.

On the other hand, some companies are running services on the cloud that are not actually critical in the grand scheme of their operations, and to these companies I would not blindly encourage using Azure Monitor. Of course, if they are interested nevertheless, then I would say, sure, they can go forward with it as long as they understand that they will have to pay Microsoft accordingly in order to get something out of Azure Monitor. 

I would rate Azure Monitor an eight out of ten.

The solution is included in all of our solutions created with ISO. We always include Azure Monitor as the primary service to review the infrastructure state for our customers.

The most valuable feature is the universality of their functionalities in all Azure services, including, software solutions.

I would like more transparency when we use the solution with another environment, like on-premises, or on another cloud environment, like AWS or GCP.

What I would like to see in the next release is not directly related to the solution, but it depends on Azure cost management. Maybe if we had the opportunity to monitor the cost of Azure and another cloud in one environment, and maybe integrate that with Azure Monitor, that would be incredible and amazing for any IT company to offer that to our customers.

I have been using the solution for almost four years.

The licensing is a monthly fee.

I give this solution a nine out of ten.

I use Azure Monitors and Azure monitoring to monitor our applications.

It is used for balancing how your servers are working and how your servers are responding to the end user in the form of your inputs and output responses, your gate input responses and post request, and how your server is working about the workload, et cetera. We can monitor all of this by using Azure monitoring tools. There are some application insights also that we can use to put in more detailed metrics as related to the logs and the failure of the servers, and downtime, et cetera.

We like the monitoring. We can look for the downtimes and look at the log to see whenever there is a crash and all the information around it.

It's very straightforward to set up.

The solution is stable.

You can scale the product.

The pricing is less than Dynatrace.

They need to work with other cloud providers - not just Azure. We'd like them to work with clouds such as GCP, AWS, and Alibaba, for example. 

I've used the solution for quite a long while, however, recently we moved from on-premise to the cloud. 

It's quite stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The solution is scalable.

I've never used technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they would be. 

We are moving our applications to Azure Web Apps.

Earlier we used Dynatrace, however, it was quite costly.

The solution is very straightforward. It's very easy to implement. 

We can use different services by Azure, such as virtual machines or Web Apps. These are all quite frequently deployed and it's not difficult. 

We handle the initial setup in-house. 

I'm not concerned about the pricing. Actually that is handled by a different team.

It is a pay-as-you-go service. We pay as needed.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. A centralized team handles that aspect.

I'd recommend the solution to others. 

I'd rate the product eight out of ten.

Azure Monitor is utilized for observability purposes, specifically for monitoring and alerting Azure states to customers.

Log analytics and log queries are the most valuable features of Azure Monitor.

We encounter some difficulties in monitoring the operating system on its own. Therefore, we require additional tools to obtain a comprehensive view of the entire application chain.

The technical support can be faster and has room for improvement.

The dashboarding and reports could benefit from improvements, as Microsoft seems to prioritize Power BI as their main dashboarding tool. Perhaps these enhancements could be integrated natively into Azure, as there is certainly room for improvement in that area.

I have been using the solution for seven years.

I give the stability a ten out of ten.

Azure Monitor is scalable.

The technical support is not always perfect. Sometimes it takes a long time to get the right person who actually understands the issue to work on the case.

We find the initial setup to be straightforward as we have extensive experience in it. However, configuring Azure Monitor may prove to be complex for those who are less experienced. The deployment takes about 30 minutes. The deployment process is using a CICD workflow that is fully automated.

The implementation was completed in-house. I work as an integrator and am responsible for implementing solutions for our customers.

There is a monthly fee for the alerts triggered and the data stored.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

We have 35 customers using the solution.

We have a small DevOps team of about ten developers that maintain this life cycle.

The reason for using this solution is to align with the hyperscaler's capabilities as close as possible, and this is the best-integrated solution we can find.

I mainly use Azure Monitor to monitor my WordPress site for availability, performance, and error logs.

Azure Monitor provides visibility and proactive alerts, which means that if anything happens, I get automated alerts from the performance monitoring tool and can fix the problem.

Azure Monitor's best features are its graphs and charts, the different visibility options, and reporting.

Azure Monitor's integration with applications could be improved. There is limited support in terms of what it can monitor, and the connectors are built in a way that only monitors a specific area. In the next release, Azure Monitor should improve its visibility features, especially for WordPress websites.

I've been using Azure Monitor for over a year.

Azure Monitor is very stable - I'd rate its stability ten out of ten.

Azure Monitor is very scalable - I'd rate its scalability ten out of ten.

Microsoft's technical support is ok, but its response time is quite high, and you have to buy very expensive support to get a better response time.

Neutral

I previously worked with SolarWinds and ManageEngine, but both were developed for on-premise environments.

The initial setup was straightforward, and deployment took around thirty minutes. I would rate the process nine out of ten.

I implemented Azure Monitor myself.

Given its low price, Azure Monitor gives good ROI.

Azure Monitor's price is minimal to the point of being almost negligible. I would rate its pricing eight out of ten.

Azure Monitor is simple and cost-effective, but make sure that it can provide you with the information you're looking for, the right metrics, and what you need in advanced and application monitoring. I would give Azure Monitor a rating of seven out of ten.

I have used the cloud version of Azure Monitor. If customers actively use a bunch of servers or resources and need to monitor the metrics of those devices or resources. Azure Monitor is used in such aforementioned cases for monitoring.

For instance, if a resource has been changed or access has been granted to a specific resource, a certain hard disk is offline, or a critical amount of disc space is in use, an alert needs to be generated and forwarded to the concerned professional, who is meant to work on resolving the alerts. 

Suppose a CPU is running at 100% capacity for a long duration. In that case, a service desk professional or a system administrator needs to be alerted using Azure Monitor to take appropriate action. 

The features that are most valuable are the alerting function and the logging functionality to analyze certain issues using log analytics or queries. The solution also supports deployment towards a set of resources based on data collection rules. 

The onboarding process of certain assets and the overall UI can be improved in Azure Monitor. 

The solution should allow the addition of certain assets to the monitoring process so that they can be incorporated into the existing monitoring set. The aforementioned process is possible using data collection rules, but it might also be possible to use agents or a network scan to find resources that can be implemented. 

I have been using Azure Monitor for one and a half years. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. The solution can offer impressive scalability because there aren't any limits in terms of tiers that need to be adhered to. Resource addition to Azure Monitor can be carried out in a straightforward manner. The cost of the solution escalates with the proportion of data ingestion, but it's quite logical. There are between 100 to 200 users of Azure Monitor in our organization. The usage of the solution varies day to day in our company. 

I would recommend others to use the solution and to keep it updated, but presently, in our company, we don't have plans to increase the usage of Azure Monitor. 

In our company, we previously used PRTG Monitor which had similar capabilities to Azure Monitor. Our company decided to switch to Azure Monitor because they were willing to deal with solutions from a single vendor. As our company expanded, they needed a vendor as a partner who had solutions suitable for large-scale companies and their internal base units. 

I would rate the initial setup as seven out of ten. The tool's configuration and usage are highly intuitive. The maintenance of the solution is majorly handled by the vendor in our company, but we still remain responsible for the data collection rules and alerts.

Our company team also remains in charge of actively incorporating the correct resources that need to be monitored by the customer team from the vendor. In our company, a team of eleven professionals remain involved in the maintenance process. 

When the solution's monitoring feature is implemented, you can guarantee the continuity of your company's IT environment and prevent data outages. Due to the high availability of your company's services, you can achieve a high ROI with Azure Monitor. 

I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten. Besides standard licensing fees the customer needs to additionally pay based on the ingested data size. The settings of the solution can be tailored during purchase based on the size of data collection and monitoring, but the cost of the solution will also increase with the data size. 

For infrastructure monitoring in our company, the alerting feature has been the most beneficial as it notifies on time to manage certain actions. Azure Monitor has impressive integration capabilities. It's not only a complete infrastructure in terms of certain resources residing in the Azure tenant; edge resources can monitor certain assets that are not in the cloud but are on-premises.  

Some time ago, our company had high CPU usage, and it was across Azure Virtual Desktops, we used certain metrics to view how many resources were in use and what was the cause of it. Then, based on the overview of the aforementioned step our company team decided to upscale some services so that the resources were more evenly divided and spread out.

Following the aforementioned initiative, the complaints regarding performance issues were eradicated. Based on the input or reports from Azure Monitor, our company team could make a decision, which in turn led to performance enhancement for end users. I would overall rate the product an eight out of ten. 

My advice to others would be to decide upfront which resources you would prefer to add to your monitoring, which is crucial for your organization, and what aspects you need to have Azure Monitor for. Due to the aforementioned initiative, you can start with the most essential features of Azure Monitor, and then you can add upon the original set later on to extend the monitoring capabilities. 

We're using Azure Monitor end connection as a hybrid model where it's integrated into Dynatrace. Azure Monitor monitors the infrastructure of Azure within our cloud environment. It doesn't give you any explanations or anything like that. It's just metrics, just data. We've integrated this data into Dynatrace so that the Dynatrace system and AI can give accurate response times, performance on metrics, and things like that. 

Azure Monitor is really just a source for Dynatrace. It's just collecting data and monitoring the environment and the infrastructure. It is fairly good at that.

There are a lot of things that take more time to do, such as charting, alerting, and correlation of data, and things like that. Azure Monitor doesn't tell you why something happened. It just tells you that it happened. 

It should also have some type of AI. Environments and applications are becoming more and more complex every day with hundreds or thousands of microservices. Therefore, having to do a lot of the stuff manually takes a lot of time, and on top of that, troubleshooting issues takes a lot of time. The traditional method of troubleshooting doesn't really work for or apply to this environment we're in. So, having an AI-based system and the ability to automate deployments of your monitoring and configurations makes it much easier.

We have been using Azure Monitor for nine months.

It's pretty stable.

I haven't scaled it. We're still building things.

I didn't personally have to deal with them. I did contact them once or twice earlier on. It was okay. It seemed like the usual Microsoft kind of approach. You submit an email and all of your information, and then you get a response back the next day. I'm sure it would be better if you had a support plan, but I don't know that specifically.

There needs to be a better process or method to deploy and configure it. Currently, there's a lot of manual intervention. It is not really an out-of-the-box solution.

If you want to get help, you will have to pay for it. Otherwise, you just do it on your own. The problem with doing it on your own is that if you're not so familiar with it, then you have to first familiarize yourself with Azure and setting up different alerts, etc. You really don't get a whole lot of these complexities with Dynatrace.

I wasn't a part of Azure deployment. My area of focus is Application Performance Monitoring, and I was involved with that. For the rest of the Azure environment, there were several teams.

There is Azure Monitor, and then there is Azure Application Insights, which is a component of Azure. Azure Application Insights does similar things as Dynatrace, but just not as good as Dynatrace. There's a lot of manual configuration for Azure Monitor and Application Insights, which isn't there with Dynatrace.

I would rate Azure Monitor an eight out of ten. 

I use the Azure Monitor in my company since it is a part of every solution we send to our customers. From a monitoring perspective, the use cases attached to the tool are enormous. Usually, my company uses it to monitor all Azure services that our customers use. My company also uses Azure Monitor if we want to monitor our customers' on-premises environment. In the case of any third-party cloud environment, my company suggests that customers have Azure Arc implemented in their environment. With it, they can monitor usage and monitoring while having one single dashboard for all their environments.

The solution's most valuable features are its ease of use and support for multiple environments. With the tool, the customer can have a single dashboard for all the environments.

The product should integrate well with other tools or clouds in the future, as it is one of the areas where the product currently has certain shortcomings.

I have experience with Azure Monitor.

It is a pretty stable solution.

It is a very scalable solution.

I am actively working with around 20 to 25 customers, and I know that the monitoring process is a part of every solution. As a part of our company's best practices, we provide a pitch associated with Azure Monitor to each and every customer.

The solution's technical support team is fast, knowledgeable, and customer-friendly.

I have experience with Azure Backup.

The product's initial setup phase is straightforward.

To have a simple monitoring system in place, I don't think it will take more than a day to enable it with the basic dashboards. If customers have a very unique requirement and need a dashboard of a specific type, then in such cases, it takes some time to develop the dashboard and publish the data. The deployment and time to create a dashboard can keep varying.

The solution is deployed on the cloud. The tool supports another cloud on-premises as well.

The product offers a pay-as-you-go model to users. The charges are to be paid according to the usage of the product.

Azure Monitor's integration capabilities make integrations very easy. The tool supports on-premises and other cloud environments.

I suggest that for each and every solution in place, one should have a monitoring tool because it is a crucial component of any solution.

I don't think that much about AI-related stuff when it comes to the tool since I don't think it would make much of a difference.

The value provided by the product stems from the fact that its customers can monitor their environment on a single dashboard and can look at areas like usage, triggers, and IOPS and CPU memory utilization. If there are any alerts, one can set certain triggers in the tool.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.