Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor offers centralized monitoring and logging capabilities, assisting IR teams in detecting and responding to security events in Microsoft Azure.
Azure Monitor is a comprehensive monitoring and observability service provided by Microsoft Azure that allows users to collect, analyze, and act on telemetry data from various Azure resources and applications. It provides insights into the performance, availability, and health of Azure services and applications, helping organizations proactively identify and address issues before they impact users.
Key features of Azure Monitor include the following:
- Metrics collection: Azure Monitor collects performance metrics from Azure resources such as virtual machines (VMs), databases, storage accounts, and more. These metrics provide real-time information on resource utilization and health.
- Log Analytics: Azure Monitor offers Log Analytics, which enables users to collect and analyze log data from Azure resources and applications. It supports custom log data, making it possible to centralize logs from various sources.
- Alerting and notifications: Azure Monitor allows users to set up alerts based on specific metric thresholds or log query results. When an alert condition is met, it can trigger notifications via email, SMS, or integration with other services such as Microsoft Teams.
- Application Insights: Application Insights, a part of Azure Monitor, is used for application performance monitoring. It provides detailed telemetry data and insights into the usage and behavior of web applications, APIs, and other components.
- Diagnostics and troubleshooting: Azure Monitor facilitates troubleshooting with diagnostic logs that offer detailed information on resource operations and potential issues.
- Autoscale: Azure Monitor integrates with Autoscale, enabling automatic scaling of resources based on predefined conditions, such as CPU utilization or queue length.
Use cases of Azure Monitor include the following:
- Resource monitoring: Azure Monitor helps monitor the performance and health of various Azure resources, such as VMs, databases, virtual networks, and storage accounts. It enables users to track metrics, set alerts, and diagnose issues.
- Application performance monitoring (APM): With Application Insights, Azure Monitor provides in-depth monitoring of web applications and APIs. It helps identify slow response times, track user interactions, and pinpoint performance bottlenecks.
- Infrastructure monitoring: Azure Monitor allows for monitoring the health and performance of infrastructure components such as VMs, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters, and Azure functions.
- Alerting and incident management (IM): Users can configure alerts in Azure Monitor to notify teams about critical conditions or service disruptions. This aids in proactive IM and quick issue resolution.
- Capacity planning: By analyzing performance metrics and trends, Azure Monitor helps organizations plan resource capacity to optimize cost and performance.
- Security and compliance: Azure Monitor can be used to track and analyze security-related events and logs, enhancing security monitoring and compliance efforts.
- Integration with third-party monitoring tools: Azure Monitor supports integration with various third-party monitoring tools and solutions, allowing users to consolidate monitoring data from multiple sources.