Azure Monitor Reviews

We are doing the Azure cloud transformation by moving to link up the application to the cloud. Monitoring is one part of application's transformation.

I only work with the cloud-based model. 

They can simplify the overall complexity since you have multiple data sources in the cloud for monitoring. It's quite simple, but there are so many portals. It takes time to work with it. If they could simplify the user configuration, that would be good.

The integration capabilities could use some improvements.

The product is stable.

It's a service from Microsoft, so it will scale.

I have not contacted the technical support for Azure Monitor.

It is easy to create a ticket. The overall Microsoft Azure could be faster.

This was only the traditional basic monitoring for Azure.

It depends of the things that you're going to monitor. For example, when configuring a third-party social Internet application on IaaS services and PaaS, I don't have a software development background. Therefore, it's quite difficult to ask the infrastructure guys, "What is something that I need to monitor from the Azure's SQL Server databases and infrastructure."

It's a fast service to deploy. It's more about defining the configuration. You need to find the right attributes to monitor. It takes about two weeks (10 to 20 days) to assign what to monitor. The actual configuration is quite fast. 

I did a private installation for the customer's Intranet.

We use Azure Data Factory mainly, and we build our own ETR using Databricks. We are a services company, so depending on the requirement for the customer, we use all of Azure's products. We work with infrastructure deployment and want to monitor the health of our deployments.

The metrics and alerts in Azure Monitor allow us to set thresholds on the metrics and receive alerts, providing a good facility for monitoring.

Azure Monitor has metrics and alerts capabilities. It allows you to set thresholds on the metrics and receive alerts. This is an important feature for monitoring.

Azure Monitor could improve by adding capabilities for data observability and integrating more tightly with their data platform components.

I have been familiar with Azure Monitor for the last three to four years.

The technical support by Microsoft Azure is good, however, there is room for improvement in their overall competence.

Neutral

Previously, we used open-source tools before adopting Azure Monitor.

Using Azure Monitor is less of a hassle for existing Azure customers than procuring another product, even if the cost may be slightly higher. Avoiding additional bureaucracy is also easier when using Azure Monitor as part of the existing Azure suite.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We haven't yet implemented it in my current company. It's going to be for our clients. We're an MSP, and we'll be implementing it for some of our clients. The only thing that we're thinking about is using it for performance monitoring and storage monitoring. Its use case is most likely going to be to manage data.

We're building out a cloud plan. We're trying to pick our own. We're trying to move certain companies into the cloud. There is a debate going on about taking the Microsoft route rather than the AWS route or the Google route. If we're going to go with Azure, we would need a monitoring tool.

The only things for which our company might be using it are storage monitoring and performance monitoring. Nothing else.

In the last company where I worked about a year ago, it looked very simple. 

Its interface has room for improvement. Some of the options or some of the ways to navigate could be improved, but that's a general thing. All companies are always modifying the user interface because there's a better way to move things around or a better way to put things so that people can see the product features that they didn't know existed. For me, that's probably the biggest thing.

It's a little lacking in features. There are some things that they could do to improve it, but it's not that big of a deal for me. There's obviously competition that does a lot more, but for what we're going to be using it for, it's perfectly fine. The biggest one is probably just the user interface. There could be more advanced logging at the database level. They can also improve their query builder to allow you to search for things better, but I last used it about a year ago. They might have already changed a ton of things in the newer versions.

I've used this solution for two years. I last used it in my previous company about a year ago.

It was pretty straightforward. 

Based on my experience with Azure Monitor about a year ago, I'd rate it a seven out of ten. There are better tools with better interfaces, deeper integration into applications, and things like that, but they could have improved it, and it could be a lot more comfortable now than when I was using it.

I use Monitor for up-down (up time / down time) monitoring and tracking performance events within Azure. Essentially, I use it for log analytic searches, backend searches, and also to provide insights into Azure Monitor.

I find that the new dynamic alerting is a pretty good feature now. It bought the product up to date. Response times for alerts are much better than they were. Also running event searches within Azure Monitor. They're quite handy features and I find them all valuable.

I'm quite involved in the automation of dynamic alerts so I really can provide some insight into how that can be improved. They did have an alerts feature before and it was quite well automated, but since they've gone to a dynamic model and did a few updates, it broke a few things. Some commands that were used before no longer work. But some things that could be improved are:

• Feedback should really be feeding back to MSFC (Windows Server Failover Cluster). 
• Make it so you can actually create more dynamic alerts on the fly. 
• Add capabilities to export templates dynamically. 
• Integrate better with Terraform — which everybody seems to be using these days. The integration with Terraform is broken on the Terraform side as well so it's not working as well as it should be from either point.

The stability of the product is okay. We've got to do some further testing with alerting. It is something we are at the point of using now with our customers. A client was previously getting flooded with alerts but not when we were able to suppress alerts in the right way. So, I think it's pretty stable compared to how it was. There is still more room for improvement.

I think the scalability is pretty good and you can plug-and-play pretty well. I'm not sure how well the product talks to other third-party tools, but overall the scalability is good. I don't think they are going to scrap the current model but they've got a lot of things that you can embed now with service help metrics. I think it is a pretty good bonus. There is a new upscale function as well, so scalability is pretty good.

The technical support is pretty good. They have been getting better. A lot of the call center operations are offshore these days, but that situation has been getting better as well. I would say there is an improvement in technical support in response time to tickets. They usually get to things within four to eight hours. Even if the technicians say there is going to be a 24-hour response — like a class C ticket — it still goes through.

The product is in the portal, so you don't really need to set it up. When you get your subscription it is all built-in. If you're setting up customized resources and alerting, then you need to set up the action groups and some other things. For example, I put automation on group creation which sets the alerts and additional parameters. It isn't necessary but it is a good option to take advantage of. The only thing that gets in the way during setup is the integration. I think the setup is getting better and easier than it was.

I implemented the product myself with customizations and building it out for our needs.

I have been using this product almost since it was first released. It changed in the last two or three years to be officially launched. I think the initial release of Monitor came out about four years ago and has improved a bit. So on a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Azure Monitor further up there than I would have before. It is eight now. It is really production-ready. I'm not going to give it 10 out of 10 cause nothing's ever that good but I'll give it an 8.5 out of 10.

To get closer to being a ten they would need automation of alerting. What I mean by this is adding a feature where you drag-and-drop what you want and then you can click and it exports the template. That would be ideal. I think there is actually a way to do that template export, but there isn't a dedicated export function. You can do that without a dedicated function when you deploy, but you can't do that with a visual monitor at the moment. 

In any case, I would definitely recommend the product for Azure users because it is seamlessly integrated into the platform.

We are currently testing the Azure Monitor, yet we've not turned it on for production yet.

We were looking for a monitoring tool. We needed a few features, and then we thought that Azure Monitor might not be able to do everything for us out of the box. There might be some development work that may be involved if we have to use Azure Monitor. However, we've really not used it. We are just trying it out now.

The major thing we will use it for is to monitor applications and then resources. For the ones that are on the app services, they are straightforward; however, we're looking at monitoring applications that are running on the virtual machines, on VMs. That's not straightforward. You need to be able to use some APIs to be able to do the logs from the applications that are running on the VM and all that. 

We are in the POC phase. We're still testing things out. 

I'm not working with it directly and therefore haven't noted any outstanding features. 

I'm not working with it directly and therefore haven't noted any missing features.

The setup so far has been complicated.

It might not have all of the capabilities we will need. 

We've barely used it. We just tested it now. We are now trying to turn on our production environment for a while. We just started using it a week or two ago.

We've barely used the solution for production. It's hard to grade the stability at this point. 

I'm not working with the solution directly and can't comment on the scalability.

From what I've seen so far, for our use case, it's a bit complicated if we have to monitor directly from the virtual machine or if we need to pull logs and stuff from the virtual machine to create an API and all that. You need a developer to be able to create an API for you so that the Azure Monitor can consume or pull the logs. From the discussions I've had with the cloud engineer and what we've seen, that area is a bit complicated. That said, it's not like it can't be done.

The pricing is a bit tricky with regard to the storage and then the load. You need to be very particular about what the storage is about. You need to consider the size of storage you need and then the load that you be pushing as well. If you look at the fact sheet, then it is expensive. However, you can't go with the fact sheet since the fact sheet doesn't factor in the environment to determine the cost estimation.

It could be cheap, or it could be expensive, depending on how you deploy or configure it.

We've also looked at SolarWinds. We are looking at ManageEngine, and we're also looking at Foglight Evolve. These are some of the solutions that we are looking at for monitoring.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. We usually just turn it on. 

The upside to the solution is if you are working in a Microsoft or Azure environment, it makes things easier. It's like a Mercedes mechanic working on a Mercedes car as opposed to a Toyota. If you are within the Azure umbrella, it's easier. However, it depends on the company and what it wants to achieve.

I'd rate it six out of ten. 

We have a financial application that needs to be working, and for our organization, it's important to be able to see the status of the overall application, which we have now. That's our primary use case for the solution. 

The solution integrates well with the Microsoft platform.

In comparison to New Relic, which I've used before, it's a bit more complicated. It's not as easy to use. It also took some time to get it working. The implementation needs to be simpler.

Right now, we're planning to increase usage. We're migrating from on-premises to the cloud. Currently, we have 25 users.

We previously used New Relic. Azure Monitor does a better job of integrating with Microsoft, which is one of its main selling points.

The deployment of the solution is somewhat complex because not all the tools are easy to understand. Just like New Relic, you use the SQL language to do the requests that you want to have specific for your APM. That's a little bit different than I'm used to. I'm trying to learn the language right now.

Currently, we are using all deployment models: public cloud, private, hybrid, and on-premises. Since we already have Azure, they deliver the monitoring solution as part of our environment.

Azure is more integrated into the infrastructure than New Relic was. You can use infrastructure components versus the analytics tool, which is a separate component that you can use for multiple things in different ways.

Currently, I would rate the solution eight out of ten. It's working very well. It does exactly what I expect it to do. I think it's a good solution. It's very well supported by Microsoft.

We use this solution for recording the logs and generating dashboards using Azure broad view insights. It is a great solution.

The solution should have cross-connection or cross-communication between tech partners. For example, it should be able to read the logs in the database and GCP environment by enabling a couple of hooks to collect information from cloud vendors to Azure Insights.

We have been using this solution for two years.

It is a stable solution. 

Azure Monitor is scalable, and we have not encountered any issues.

We have used Microsoft support for one or two usages regarding our area integrations. We already have some education with Microsoft Azure, and I believe a couple of engineers from Microsoft work on the technical support.

It is a move-in powerful feature compared to other market-leading tools. It has the capability to not only monitor your applications but also deliver dashboards. We can pinpoint different areas for improvement and it provides the ability to identify precisely what dash metrics are failing. It is introspective on contextual logging and delivers good dashboards. This helps senior management manage, alert, debug and look at operational insights.

We are using multiple monitoring tools at the moment and are looking for a single solution that can monitor everything. As part of our current setup, we are using Azure Monitor to monitor our network.

It ensures that our network is responding correctly and looks to see if there are any anomalies.

The most valuable feature is that it ensures our servers are up.

When something goes down, we want the option to have automation in place to get it back up again as quickly as possible.

It is not very user-friendly so the GUI can be improved.

We have just started using Azure Monitor.

We have had no issues with respect to stability.

Scalability has not been a problem.

We have used other monitoring tools and one of the advantages of Azure Monitor is that it is easier for us to use because we're mainly a Microsoft shop.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. We deployed in stages over about a month.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this tool is to take your time with it and see if it is the right one for you. If it is, then get rid of all of the other tools.

This is a good product but it is not very user-friendly at this stage.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.