¶ Azure Monitor (Microsoft Azure)
¶ Cloud Technologies
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Introduction to Azure Monitor: Understanding the Nervous System of Modern Cloud Workloads
Every modern application tells a story. It speaks through logs, signals through metrics, whispers through traces, and reveals its patterns through data points captured over time. When an application is healthy, its signals align in predictable rhythms. When something goes wrong, those rhythms shift—sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically. In the world of cloud computing, the ability to observe, understand, and act on these signals is no longer optional. It’s a necessity. And that is exactly why Azure Monitor exists.
If you’re beginning this course of one hundred articles dedicated to Azure Monitor, you’re stepping into one of the most essential yet often underappreciated pillars of cloud architecture: observability. Because no matter how well you design an application, no matter how elegantly you write your code, real-world systems behave in ways you cannot always predict. Traffic spikes unexpectedly. Dependencies slow down. Resources run hot. Errors cascade. Security anomalies appear. And performance fluctuates in ways that can baffle even seasoned engineers.
Azure Monitor was built to bring clarity to that chaos. It acts as the central nervous system of the Microsoft Azure cloud—collecting signals from every corner of your environment, correlating patterns, surfacing insights, and giving you the situational awareness needed to keep systems healthy, performant, and secure.
But Azure Monitor is not just a tool for troubleshooting. It is a foundation for operational excellence, cost optimization, automation, compliance, and intelligent decision-making. It helps teams build not just functional systems, but resilient systems—systems that recover quickly, behave predictably, scale intelligently, and offer a seamless experience to users.
Throughout this course, you will explore Azure Monitor not as a separate service, but as an ecosystem—an interconnected collection of tools, collectors, workspaces, analytics engines, alerts, dashboards, agents, APIs, and insights. You will understand how it ties together all layers of cloud architecture:
- Your virtual machines
- Your applications
- Your containers
- Your Kubernetes clusters
- Your networking systems
- Your identities
- Your databases
- Your storage
- Your serverless workloads
- Your hybrid environments
- And even your on-premises resources
Azure Monitor doesn’t discriminate. If it generates telemetry, Azure Monitor can understand it.
But before diving into the broad features, it’s important to understand why observability has become so critical. The cloud changed everything. Applications are no longer monolithic or tightly coupled. They are distributed across regions, built on microservices, powered by serverless logic, integrated with third-party APIs, hosted on managed platforms, and scaled automatically based on invisible triggers. This complexity brought agility and elasticity, but it also brought unpredictability. Without a proper monitoring system, cloud workloads become black boxes—difficult to troubleshoot and even harder to optimize.
Azure Monitor brings light into that box. It collects data from three core pillars of observability:
- Metrics – numeric, time-series data for real-time performance
- Logs – detailed, searchable records of events and operations
- Traces – request-level insights for end-to-end performance analysis
Together, these give you not just visibility, but understanding. They help you answer questions like:
- Why did this request slow down?
- Where did this error originate?
- Which part of the application consumed excessive memory?
- What caused this service to restart?
- Why is my cloud bill suddenly higher?
- Which region is experiencing latency?
- What changed in the last deployment?
- How is my application behaving under load?
Azure Monitor becomes the lens through which you observe the life of your cloud environment. And what’s powerful is that it’s not passive. It’s designed to detect issues before users notice, trigger alerts automatically, feed dashboards with fresh insights, integrate with automation systems, and collaborate with services like Azure Security Center, Azure Advisor, and Azure Policy.
As you journey through this course, you’ll explore how Azure Monitor integrates deeply with Log Analytics, one of the most powerful data analysis engines available in the cloud. You’ll learn how to write Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries that unlock patterns hidden inside billions of data points. You’ll see how logs across services correlate, how anomalies surface through smart analytics, and how dashboards transform data into stories that teams can act on.
You’ll also explore Azure Monitor’s role in application performance monitoring through Application Insights. This is where developers gain deep performance telemetry, understand user behavior, inspect distributed traces, measure real-time dependencies, and analyze the efficiency of their code. Application Insights becomes the window through which developers witness their application running in the wild.
Another important layer of this course will focus on infrastructure monitoring. Virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, containers, database services, load balancers, message queues, APIs—all of these produce enormous telemetry that must be brought together cohesively. Azure Monitor provides that cohesion. It turns scattered telemetry into unified operational intelligence that operations teams can trust.
One of the most fascinating things about Azure Monitor is its dual nature. On one hand, it is incredibly technical, dealing with agents, pipelines, ingestion methods, data schemas, retention policies, and distributed monitoring architecture. On the other hand, it is deeply human, designed to help people make decisions—whether developers, DevOps engineers, SREs, data engineers, or security teams.
This human-centered aspect becomes especially clear when you explore alerting and automation. Azure Monitor can detect patterns, evaluate thresholds, analyze trends, and trigger notifications the moment something goes wrong. But more importantly, it can automatically take action—scaling resources, restarting services, running remediation logic, or invoking workflows through Logic Apps and Azure Automation. Issues get resolved before anyone even logs in to check.
As you move deeper into the course, you’ll explore how Azure Monitor supports hybrid and multi-cloud environments. With modern companies running workloads across Azure, on-premises datacenters, other clouds, and edge locations, the idea of single-silo monitoring disappears. Azure Monitor extends far beyond Azure itself. With the right agents and integrations, it becomes the centralized hub for enterprise-wide observability.
Then there is the role of Azure Monitor in cost governance. Cloud environments are dynamic, and costs shift constantly. Telemetry about resource utilization, scaling events, and performance behavior helps teams make informed decisions about provisioning, test environments, autoscaling policies, and architecture design. Azure Monitor becomes a financial tool just as much as an operational one.
Another major theme in this course will be AI-enhanced monitoring. Azure Monitor incorporates machine learning models to detect anomalies, analyze trends, and identify outliers that human teams might overlook. These insights improve reliability, reduce downtime, and provide early warning systems that protect businesses from cascading failures.
You’ll also explore how Azure Monitor aligns with DevOps and SRE practices. Continuous delivery pipelines, blue-green deployments, canary releases, chaos engineering experiments, and performance tests all rely on strong observability. Azure Monitor gives teams the ability to validate deployments, measure SLAs, enforce SLOs, and maintain uptime targets.
As you gain familiarity with Azure Monitor’s depth, you will begin to see it not as a single tool, but as an ecosystem that supports:
- Developers building applications
- Operators maintaining systems
- Analysts interpreting trends
- Security teams responding to threats
- Architects designing distributed systems
- Executives seeking visibility across the organization
By the end of this course, you will understand not only how to use Azure Monitor—you will understand how to think like someone managing real-world cloud systems. You’ll see how telemetry becomes insight, how insight becomes action, and how action becomes stability.
You’ll be ready to build dashboards that executives understand, queries that engineers rely on, alerts that prevent failures, and analytics that reveal what’s truly happening inside your cloud environment.
Azure Monitor is the heartbeat of Azure operations. When you learn how to read that heartbeat, you begin to understand the rhythm of your applications, the pulse of your infrastructure, and the signals that keep everything running smoothly.
This course invites you to step into that world. To learn how observability empowers decision-making. To explore the intelligence behind cloud monitoring. To understand the layers of telemetry that describe the life of your systems.
Let’s begin the journey.
¶ Azure Monitor (Microsoft Azure)
¶ Introduction to Azure Monitor
1. Introduction to Cloud Monitoring: Why Azure Monitor Matters
2. What is Azure Monitor? An Overview of the Service
3. The Importance of Monitoring in Cloud Environments
4. Key Components of Azure Monitor: Metrics, Logs, Alerts, and Dashboards
5. Azure Monitor vs. Other Cloud Monitoring Tools
6. Key Concepts: Resources, Resource Groups, and Log Analytics
7. Introduction to Azure Monitor Pricing and Cost Management
8. Azure Monitor and the Azure Ecosystem: Integration with Other Services
9. Overview of Azure Monitor's Role in Modern DevOps Practices
10. Setting Up Your Azure Monitor Account and Workspace
¶ Getting Started with Azure Monitor
11. Configuring Azure Monitor for Your First Azure Resource
12. How to Navigate the Azure Monitor Dashboard
13. Setting Up Azure Monitor for Virtual Machines and Resources
14. Creating and Managing Azure Monitor Workspaces
15. Understanding Azure Monitor Metrics and Log Data Collection
16. Configuring Data Sources for Azure Monitor (Virtual Machines, App Services)
17. Working with Azure Monitor Agents: Installing and Configuring
18. Exploring Azure Monitor Metrics Explorer for Real-Time Insights
19. Setting Up Basic Alerts and Notifications in Azure Monitor
20. First Steps with Azure Monitor for Networks and Containers
¶ Azure Monitor Metrics
21. Introduction to Azure Monitor Metrics and Data Types
22. Collecting and Visualizing Metrics from Azure Resources
23. Creating Custom Metrics and Collecting Telemetry Data
24. Configuring Metric Alerts for Resource Monitoring
25. Understanding Metric Aggregations and Filtering in Azure Monitor
26. Using Metric Workbooks to Visualize Data
27. Managing and Accessing Historic Metric Data in Azure Monitor
28. Real-Time Metrics Analysis with Azure Monitor
29. Advanced Metric Queries with Kusto Query Language (KQL)
30. Troubleshooting Common Metric Collection Issues in Azure Monitor
¶ Azure Monitor Logs
31. What Are Azure Monitor Logs and How Do They Work?
32. Introduction to Azure Log Analytics and Kusto Query Language (KQL)
33. Collecting Logs from Azure Resources and Virtual Machines
34. Configuring Diagnostic Settings for Log Collection in Azure Monitor
35. Creating and Managing Log Analytics Workspaces
36. Building Queries in Log Analytics for Custom Insights
37. Understanding Log Retention and Data Storage in Azure Monitor
38. Creating Log Alerts and Action Groups for Real-Time Notifications
39. Integrating Custom Logs into Azure Monitor
40. Troubleshooting Log Collection and Query Issues
¶ Azure Monitor Alerts and Notifications
41. Introduction to Azure Monitor Alerts: Types and Best Practices
42. Creating and Managing Alerts in Azure Monitor
43. Configuring Action Groups for Automated Responses to Alerts
44. Advanced Alerting with Dynamic Thresholds
45. Setting Up Multi-Resource Alerts for Cross-Resource Monitoring
46. Working with Smart Alerts and Predictive Monitoring
47. Configuring Email, SMS, and Webhook Notifications for Alerts
48. Monitoring Alert History and Effectiveness
49. Customizing Alert Severity Levels and Notifications
50. Best Practices for Alert Management in Azure Monitor
¶ Azure Monitor Dashboards
51. Introduction to Azure Monitor Dashboards for Visual Insights
52. Creating and Customizing Azure Monitor Dashboards
53. Using Workbooks to Build Interactive Dashboards
54. Pinning Metrics and Logs to Dashboards for Quick Access
55. Sharing and Collaborating on Azure Monitor Dashboards
56. Best Practices for Dashboard Layout and Design
57. Monitoring Resource Health Using Dashboards
58. Managing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for Dashboards
59. Creating Custom Dashboards for Specific Teams and Use Cases
60. Integrating Azure Monitor Dashboards with Power BI for Advanced Reporting
¶ Advanced Monitoring and Integration
61. Integrating Azure Monitor with Azure Security Center
62. Using Azure Monitor with Azure Application Insights for Application Monitoring
63. Configuring and Monitoring Azure Active Directory Logs
64. Integrating Azure Monitor with Log Analytics for Unified Monitoring
65. Combining Azure Monitor with Azure Sentinel for Security Insights
66. Integrating Azure Monitor with Third-Party Monitoring Tools (e.g., Grafana)
67. Using Azure Monitor for Containers and Kubernetes Cluster Monitoring
68. Monitoring and Managing Azure Functions with Azure Monitor
69. Using Azure Monitor to Track Azure API Management
70. Configuring Monitoring for Hybrid Environments with Azure Monitor
¶ Azure Monitor for Networking
71. Introduction to Azure Monitor for Network Insights
72. Monitoring Network Performance with Azure Network Watcher
73. Configuring Network Diagnostic Tools in Azure Monitor
74. Monitoring Virtual Networks and Subnets with Azure Monitor
75. Using Azure Monitor for VPN Gateway and ExpressRoute Insights
76. Analyzing Network Traffic and Flow Logs in Azure Monitor
77. Setting Up Alerts for Network Latency and Throughput
78. Troubleshooting Network Connectivity Issues Using Azure Monitor
79. Monitoring Traffic Between Regions with Azure Monitor
80. Using Azure Monitor for DNS and Load Balancer Monitoring
¶ Azure Monitor for Virtual Machines
81. How to Monitor Virtual Machines (VMs) in Azure Monitor
82. Setting Up VM Monitoring for Performance and Resource Utilization
83. Collecting VM Diagnostic Data and Insights
84. Troubleshooting VM Performance with Azure Monitor
85. Monitoring VM Health and Availability in Azure Monitor
86. Configuring Alerts for VM Resource Utilization and Failures
87. Integrating Azure Monitor with Azure Automation for VM Management
88. Setting Up Auto-scaling Based on VM Metrics
89. Azure Monitor for Azure Arc-enabled VMs
90. Monitoring Virtual Machine Extensions and Configurations
¶ Azure Monitor for Applications
91. Introduction to Application Insights: Monitoring Web Apps and APIs
92. Monitoring Azure App Services and Web Apps with Azure Monitor
93. Configuring Application Insights for Real-Time Performance Monitoring
94. Monitoring Distributed Applications with Azure Monitor and Application Insights
95. Using Application Insights for Deep Diagnostics and Troubleshooting
96. Integrating Application Insights with Azure DevOps for CI/CD
97. Analyzing Application Telemetry Data with KQL
98. Using Azure Monitor to Track Azure Logic Apps and Power Automate Flows
99. Collecting Custom Application Logs in Azure Monitor
100. Best Practices for Application Performance Management with Azure Monitor