Azure Monitor
By Microsoft
Azure Monitor is Microsoft Azure's full-stack monitoring service that collects metrics, logs, and traces from Azure resources and applications, providing dashboards, alerting, and automated responses to keep systems healthy.
Definition
Azure Monitor is Microsoft Azure's full-stack monitoring service that collects metrics, logs, and traces from Azure resources and applications, providing dashboards, alerting, and automated responses to keep systems healthy.
Overview
Azure Monitor is the umbrella service Azure resources report telemetry to, playing the same role for Azure that AWS CloudWatch plays for AWS. It brings together platform metrics (emitted automatically by most Azure services), activity logs (a record of control-plane operations like resource creation or deletion), and Log Analytics, which stores and lets you query structured log and telemetry data using the Kusto Query Language (KQL). Application Insights, a feature built on Azure Monitor, adds application performance monitoring: it can automatically instrument web apps to capture request rates, response times, exception traces, and dependency calls, giving developers distributed-tracing-style visibility without manually adding instrumentation everywhere. Azure Monitor Alerts then let teams define rules over any of these signals — metrics, logs, or activity log events — and route notifications or trigger automated remediation through Azure Functions, Logic Apps, or webhooks. Because Log Analytics uses a single query language across metrics and logs, Azure Monitor tends to feel more unified than piecing together separate metrics and logging tools, though teams running multi-cloud or hybrid environments often still layer a vendor-neutral observability platform like Grafana or Datadog on top for a single pane of glass across clouds.
Key Features
- Automatic collection of platform metrics from most Azure resources
- Log Analytics workspace with the Kusto Query Language (KQL) for querying logs and telemetry
- Application Insights for application performance monitoring and distributed tracing
- Activity Log tracking control-plane operations across a subscription
- Alert rules spanning metrics, logs, and activity log events
- Action Groups to route alerts to email, SMS, Functions, Logic Apps, or webhooks
- Workbooks and dashboards for combining multiple data sources into one view