Choose the best monitoring service for visibility, insight, and outage mitigation

Analyze the decision criteria

 

In this unit, you'll analyze the criteria that experts employ when they choose an Azure monitoring service for a specified business need. By understanding the criteria, you can better assess the nuanced differences among the products.

Do you need to analyze how you're using Azure to reduce costs? Improve resilience? Harden your security?

Choose Azure Advisor when you're looking for an analysis of your deployed resources. Azure Advisor analyzes the configuration and usage of your resources and provides suggestions on how to optimize for reliability, security, performance, costs, and operations based on experts' best practices.

Do you want to monitor Azure services or your usage of Azure?

If you want to keep tabs on Azure itself, especially the services and regions you depend on, you want to choose Azure Service Health. You can view the current status of the Azure services you rely on, upcoming planned outages, and services that will be sunset. You can set up alerts that help you stay on top of incidents and upcoming downtime without having to visit the dashboard regularly.

However, if you want to keep track of the performance or issues related to your specific VM or container instances, databases, your applications, and so on, you want to visit Azure Monitor and create reports and notifications to help you understand how your services are performing or diagnose issues related to your Azure usage.

Do you want to measure custom events alongside other usage metrics?

Choose Azure Monitor when you want to measure custom events alongside other collected telemetry data. Custom events, such as those added in the source code of your software applications, could help identify and diagnose why your application is behaving a certain way.

Do you need to set up alerts for outages or when autoscaling is about to deploy new instances?

Use Azure Advisor

Tailwind Traders wants to optimize its cloud spend. Also, the organization is concerned about security breaches, because it stores customer data and historical purchase data in cloud-based databases. As the organization ramps up its cloud expertise, it wants to better understand its use of the cloud, better understand best practices, and pinpoint "easy wins" where it can tighten up its cloud spend and security practices.

Which service should you choose?

Apply the decision criteria you learned about in the preceding unit to find the right option.

First, in this scenario, does Tailwind Traders need to analyze its Azure usage for the sake of optimization? Yes. Tailwind Traders understands that it might be spending too much, is concerned about its security practices, and wants to have its cloud usage analyzed against industry best practices. Therefore, Azure Advisor is the perfect option for this scenario.

Although you might have found the right product option, let's continue evaluating the decision criteria for this scenario.

Second, in this scenario, does Tailwind Traders want to monitor the health of Azure services that affect all customers or the resources that are deployed on Azure? This scenario isn't concerned with operations. However, Azure Advisor does analyze and provide recommendations for achieving operational excellence.

Third, in this scenario, does Tailwind Traders want to measure custom events alongside other usage metrics? No, measuring custom events isn't mentioned as a requirement and isn't a consideration in this scenario.

Fourth, in this scenario, does Tailwind Traders want to set up alerts for outages or when autoscaling is about to deploy new instances? Again, this scenario isn't concerned with operations. However, Azure Advisor does analyze and provide recommendations for achieving operational excellence.

Azure Advisor is the right product option to help Tailwind Traders better understand and optimize both its cloud spend and its cloud security posture. This product might help the organization with other areas of its cloud usage as well.

 

Use Azure Monitor

The Tailwind Traders e-commerce website is experiencing intermittent errors, and the team is unsure of the cause. Because of the nature of the errors, the team suspects that it's either a database or caching issue. What are the circumstances surrounding the errors? Does it happen only during peak usage times? What is the state of the team's Azure SQL instance? What is the state of its Redis caching server? How can it trace the issues to a root cause?

Which service should you choose?

As in the preceding unit, apply the decision criteria that you learned about earlier to find the right option.

First, in this scenario, does Tailwind Traders need an analysis of its Azure usage for the sake of optimization? No, optimization isn't the team's objective in this scenario, so Azure Advisor isn't a candidate.

Second, in this scenario, does Tailwind Traders want to monitor the health of Azure services that affect all customers or the resources deployed on Azure? Because this issue happens intermittently, it's unlikely to affect an entire Azure region or service. It's more likely that a logic issue exists somewhere in their e-commerce website code, or another issue is causing database failures or caching locks. In this scenario, the team could use Azure Monitor to pinpoint a specific user session and look at the performance of each service that's involved in the issue.

Third, in this scenario, does Tailwind Traders want to measure custom events alongside other usage metrics? Yes. Software developers can send additional information about the state of the web application via Application Insights to help locate the root cause of the issue. Application Insights relies on the Azure Monitor platform to store custom event information.

Fourth, in this scenario, does Tailwind Traders want to set up alerts for outages or for when autoscaling is about to deploy new instances? No, alerting isn't their objective in this scenario.

Azure Monitor is the best option for helping Tailwind Traders track this intermittent issue. The team can use a wealth of tools to help it gain insight into the application's performance at a high level and dive deep into specific issues.

Use Azure Service Health

Tailwind Traders wants to operationalize its cloud environment. Specifically, its cloud operations team wants to let stakeholders know about upcoming planned downtime in advance. The team also wants its solution architects to be forewarned about any Microsoft plans to sunset services so it can rearchitect its software products accordingly.

When outages do happen, the team wants to quickly ascertain whether the issue is specific to their services or a service interruption that affects many Azure customers. The team also wants to provide key stakeholders with reports that explain how and why the incident occurred, and so on.

Which service should you choose?

Again, apply the decision criteria you learned about earlier to find the right product.

First, in this scenario, does Tailwind Traders need to analyze its Azure usage for the sake of optimization? No, so Azure Advisor isn't a candidate for this scenario.

Second, does Tailwind Traders want to monitor the health of Azure services that affect all customers or the resources deployed on Azure? In this scenario, the requirement is to stay abreast of upcoming planned downtime. Additionally, the team wants to capture official incident reports. For this reason, Azure Service Health is the strongest candidate to choose for this scenario.

Although it's likely that you would choose Azure Service Health, let's continue evaluating the remaining decision criteria.

Third, in this scenario, does Tailwind Traders want to measure custom events alongside other usage metrics? No, measuring custom events isn't mentioned as a requirement and isn't a consideration in this scenario.

Fourth, in this scenario, does Tailwind Traders want to set up alerts for outages or when autoscaling is about to deploy new instances? Setting up alerts for outages is a requirement in this scenario, but creating alerts for other events such as autoscaling are not in scope. Use Azure Service Health to set up alerts that are specific to Azure outages that affect all Azure customers. Use Azure Monitor to set up alerts for outages and other events that affect only your specific resources.

In this scenario, Azure Service Health is the correct option to choose.

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Summary

Our goal in this module was to help Tailwind Traders explore several monitoring service offerings from Azure to apply to a variety of business scenarios.

We identified three product options and their capabilities: Azure Advisor, Azure Monitor, and Azure Service Health. We analyzed decision criteria for choosing one option over another for certain scenarios. Then we applied those decision criteria to three different challenges faced by Tailwind Traders, helping them find the best service option for the scenario.

Without monitoring services, Tailwind Traders would spend more money on its cloud environment, be unsure about its cloud security posture, have difficulty pinpointing issues in its application logic, and be unable to plan ahead for outages or supply formal outage reports to stakeholders.

Azure monitoring services provide a comprehensive array of features to help improve your cloud operations.