Azure Monitor Reviews

As a Microsoft MVP and MCT, I help our company's clients use Azure Monitor in different ways depending on what types of activity they want to monitor. From a big picture perspective, this entails checking and testing both the performance and efficiency of cloud-based applications.

Starting from the basics, such as when monitoring VMs, you are able to integrate Azure Monitor with the virtual machine so as to create alerts and notifications that are automatically triggered when, for example, the machine's performance rises above 60-70%.

You can also use Azure Monitor to help you understand the total internal activity, including the CPU or RAM performance, of specific applications on the cloud. And beyond that, there are many other metrics detailing which users have logged in (or are concurrently logged in) to the application or VM, while showing the ratios of their activity in total.

For me, the best feature is the log analysis with Azure Monitor's Log Analytics. Without being able to analyze the logs of all the activities that affect the performance of a machine, your monitoring effectiveness will be severely limited.

Although it's not always the case, the price can sometimes get expensive. This depends on a number of factors, such as how many services you are trying to integrate with Azure Monitor and how much storage they're consuming each month (for example, how large are the log files?).

Of course, this totally depends on the particular customer's environment. As the implementer, we can typically only advise on the technical outcomes for a certain usage scenario of Azure Monitor, and not necessarily the advantages or disadvantages of paying for Azure Monitor in their particular use case. For example, if they are paying $400 per month, the advantages for the customer might be that they reduce technical headaches in ensuring proper service performance without having to invest in a separate IT member to handle the monitoring. And for many customers, this makes good business sense, which is why when we propose the use of Azure Monitor in such a way and give them an example, they often take us up on the proposal, despite the costs involved.

I have been using Azure Monitor for five years.

Azure Monitor is definitely a stable product once we have deployed it to our target. Azure Monitor, when deployed to a VM, will give you a stable interface for taking readings on various aspects of a machine's performance, such as what's going on with the CPU, memory, and data communications.

When it comes to more advanced usage with deeper monitoring, Azure Monitor can integrate with AI to make the process of advising what to do about resolving certain problems much easier.

Azure Monitor is a key part of service integration and it is easy to scale and extend as needed. You can also integrate other services, even third-party ones, with it.

It provides options for scaling it to your own needs in various ways, such as by providing a choice of what types of logs will be generated and how many days you would like to keep the logs for. It also provides options for how many servers you would like to monitor, and whether you will be logging on an hourly, per-minute, or per-second basis.

I am largely satisfied with how the technical support from Microsoft explains their solutions to the issues that we've raised. Although, most of the time, they simply share the most current link from their blog of knowledge base that explains the specific activity that must be done to resolve a problem. This is because Microsoft engineers don't actually provide the technical work themselves, but instead act as advisors, where companies like mine will then be the implementer of the suggested solutions.

The setup for Azure Monitor itself is easy to understand and, for generating logs and such, it's a simple process of configuring how you would like to gather your logs and for how long you would like to keep those records, etc.

It won't take anyone that much time to deploy their monitoring system with Azure Monitor. This is especially true if you understand your business needs well, because you can then quickly integrate Azure Monitor (and Log Analytics or Workbooks) inside your application as appropriate. As an estimate, it could take up to three or four hours at most.

We implement Azure Monitor in-house. Our deployment plan is to first obtain the Azure identity and then make an effort to better understand the service that will be running on the Azure cloud. For example, is it IaaS or PaaS? If it is based on PaaS, then we'll go straight to the application inside the PaaS, and if it's on a VM, then we'll go to the VM (or container) instance and set up the deployment from there. Here, the deployment also depends on the specific resources or Azure subscriptions in use.

Customers of Azure Monitor must pay an amount that depends largely on how many services they need to integrate and the storage space required in terms of logs, etc. If they only have a few small services to monitor, the price won't be too high, but on the opposite side of the spectrum, it can certainly get pricey.

Fortunately, customers can use the calculator provided by Azure to easily estimate the total monthly costs based on the customer's requirements. 

Along with Azure, I also have experience with New Relic, for which I have handled both deployment and connectivity.

I can definitely recommend Azure Monitor for most people, but before recommending it to all I would caution that whether you choose to use it depends largely on the type of service that you are running on the cloud.

One must first be clear about the outcomes of the service that is to be monitored; if it is a critical service or application where you absolutely must monitor each data point or watch for incidents, then you will certainly want to use Azure Monitor.

On the other hand, some companies are running services on the cloud that are not actually critical in the grand scheme of their operations, and to these companies I would not blindly encourage using Azure Monitor. Of course, if they are interested nevertheless, then I would say, sure, they can go forward with it as long as they understand that they will have to pay Microsoft accordingly in order to get something out of Azure Monitor. 

I would rate Azure Monitor an eight out of ten.

The solution is included in all of our solutions created with ISO. We always include Azure Monitor as the primary service to review the infrastructure state for our customers.

The most valuable feature is the universality of their functionalities in all Azure services, including, software solutions.

I would like more transparency when we use the solution with another environment, like on-premises, or on another cloud environment, like AWS or GCP.

What I would like to see in the next release is not directly related to the solution, but it depends on Azure cost management. Maybe if we had the opportunity to monitor the cost of Azure and another cloud in one environment, and maybe integrate that with Azure Monitor, that would be incredible and amazing for any IT company to offer that to our customers.

I have been using the solution for almost four years.

The licensing is a monthly fee.

I give this solution a nine out of ten.

I mainly use Azure Monitor to monitor my WordPress site for availability, performance, and error logs.

Azure Monitor provides visibility and proactive alerts, which means that if anything happens, I get automated alerts from the performance monitoring tool and can fix the problem.

Azure Monitor's best features are its graphs and charts, the different visibility options, and reporting.

Azure Monitor's integration with applications could be improved. There is limited support in terms of what it can monitor, and the connectors are built in a way that only monitors a specific area. In the next release, Azure Monitor should improve its visibility features, especially for WordPress websites.

I've been using Azure Monitor for over a year.

Azure Monitor is very stable - I'd rate its stability ten out of ten.

Azure Monitor is very scalable - I'd rate its scalability ten out of ten.

Microsoft's technical support is ok, but its response time is quite high, and you have to buy very expensive support to get a better response time.

Neutral

I previously worked with SolarWinds and ManageEngine, but both were developed for on-premise environments.

The initial setup was straightforward, and deployment took around thirty minutes. I would rate the process nine out of ten.

I implemented Azure Monitor myself.

Given its low price, Azure Monitor gives good ROI.

Azure Monitor's price is minimal to the point of being almost negligible. I would rate its pricing eight out of ten.

Azure Monitor is simple and cost-effective, but make sure that it can provide you with the information you're looking for, the right metrics, and what you need in advanced and application monitoring. I would give Azure Monitor a rating of seven out of ten.

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're using Azure Monitor end connection as a hybrid model where it's integrated into Dynatrace. Azure Monitor monitors the infrastructure of Azure within our cloud environment. It doesn't give you any explanations or anything like that. It's just metrics, just data. We've integrated this data into Dynatrace so that the Dynatrace system and AI can give accurate response times, performance on metrics, and things like that. 

Azure Monitor is really just a source for Dynatrace. It's just collecting data and monitoring the environment and the infrastructure. It is fairly good at that.

There are a lot of things that take more time to do, such as charting, alerting, and correlation of data, and things like that. Azure Monitor doesn't tell you why something happened. It just tells you that it happened. 

It should also have some type of AI. Environments and applications are becoming more and more complex every day with hundreds or thousands of microservices. Therefore, having to do a lot of the stuff manually takes a lot of time, and on top of that, troubleshooting issues takes a lot of time. The traditional method of troubleshooting doesn't really work for or apply to this environment we're in. So, having an AI-based system and the ability to automate deployments of your monitoring and configurations makes it much easier.

We have been using Azure Monitor for nine months.

It's pretty stable.

I haven't scaled it. We're still building things.

I didn't personally have to deal with them. I did contact them once or twice earlier on. It was okay. It seemed like the usual Microsoft kind of approach. You submit an email and all of your information, and then you get a response back the next day. I'm sure it would be better if you had a support plan, but I don't know that specifically.

There needs to be a better process or method to deploy and configure it. Currently, there's a lot of manual intervention. It is not really an out-of-the-box solution.

If you want to get help, you will have to pay for it. Otherwise, you just do it on your own. The problem with doing it on your own is that if you're not so familiar with it, then you have to first familiarize yourself with Azure and setting up different alerts, etc. You really don't get a whole lot of these complexities with Dynatrace.

I wasn't a part of Azure deployment. My area of focus is Application Performance Monitoring, and I was involved with that. For the rest of the Azure environment, there were several teams.

There is Azure Monitor, and then there is Azure Application Insights, which is a component of Azure. Azure Application Insights does similar things as Dynatrace, but just not as good as Dynatrace. There's a lot of manual configuration for Azure Monitor and Application Insights, which isn't there with Dynatrace.

I would rate Azure Monitor an eight out of ten. 

We use this solution for basically everything. For example, we use it for infrastructure, application and resource monitoring.

It has good troubleshooting features like automated troubleshooting. It is also a flexible solution and a low-cost product. It includes all the features that are required for multi-cloud and public cloud.

If it is configured incorrectly, you can end up with a huge bill. Sometimes, a lot of data is collected and stored, and we may get charged for that kind of storage which is an issue.

We have been using this solution for more than two years and are currently using the latest version. It is a cloud-based solution and deployed on public cloud. Our cloud provider is Microsoft Azure.

It's stable and constantly updated with new features and functionalities.

It is scalable and can scale to any size. Five people use this solution in our organization, primarily administrators, DevOps and security personnel. It requires about two to three people for deployment and maintenance. We have dedicated people from the monitoring team that do this. We plan to expand the number of users eventually.

The technical support is quite responsive. Microsoft support is pretty good. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward and not complex. Deployment took a couple of days, and it was deployed in-house.

We have seen an ROI. It is a helpful tool and provides proactive information about the infrastructure.

We did not evaluate other options. Azure Monitor is one of the most non-native tools from Microsoft, and it's well-integrated.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. I recommend this solution to others. They should try Azure Monitor to see if it fits their requirements gradually. Additionally, there isn't a lot of upfront investment required to set it up.

The configuration could be improved in the next release because it takes a little time. However, they regularly update their scalability and features.

The most valuable features of Azure Monitor are the login analytics workspace and we can write any kind of custom queries in order to receive the data that is inserted into the login analytics workspace, diagnostic settings, et cetera.

Azure Monitor could improve network performance monitoring and make it more advanced.

I have been using Azure Monitor for more than two years.

I would rate the scalability of Azure Monitor a six out of ten.

It might be a case that there are certain services that are not available in other regions, but it's available in certain regions. You can face certain issues in one place and not another. You can't implement the same solution in all the regions. However, it might be a limitation of the cloud provider.

Technical support is good. In terms of supportability, Microsoft gives a good level of support if the company has a business account and an enterprise level of support. I believe that could be sufficient.

The initial setup of Azure Monitor was in the middle range of difficulty.

We did the implementation of this solution. We have automated everything using the infrastructure or provisioned.

There is a team required for the maintenance and support of the solution.

The cost of Azure Monitor application performance should be less expensive.

My advice would be if you can maintain the configurations that you have done, and if you have automated it, then Azure Monitor would be the best solution. The support is anyways good, but if you do not want to maintain the overhead of operations, then it should be outsourced.

I rate Azure Monitor a seven out of ten.

We use Azure Monitor as our alert system. We also use it for other types of measurement.

Currently, we use Power BI for our data visualization, and Azure Monitor is a very good fit with those cases. Another thing I like about the solution is that we can easily export the data, and the tool seamlessly works together with Datadog, though in terms of visualization in Azure Monitor, it's not as beautiful. It also doesn't have as many features as Power Bi, and this is why we were comparing it with Datadog.

We use Power BI because it has many features, so that's the main part we consider when selecting which tool to use. As for Datadog, people think of it as an application performance monitoring tool, rather than a data exporting tool, so they will still use Azure Monitor for exporting data. In some cases when the data analyst team needs some type of data, we can set that up for them on Azure Monitor, then consider using Datadog as a platform monitor.

Visualization in Azure Monitor needs improvement. Adding more features to it would also make the solution better.

My experience with Azure Monitor is six months.

Azure Monitor is a stable tool.

Azure Monitor is scalable, but the only downside to it is that it's not an out-of-the-box (OOTB) solution, so we cannot scale it to something outside of Azure ServiceNow. Currently, we use ServiceNow as a ticketing system, then use Datadog as the incident and alert system to trigger a ticket in ServiceNow, which we cannot do in Azure Monitor.

Azure Monitor is a low-priced solution.

We evaluated Datadog.

I was comparing Datadog and Azure Monitor. We had a POC for Datadog and we were trying to test it with the trial account for our current data solution in Azure, so we tried to measure the differences between the two solutions.

Now we use Azure Monitor for our alerts and other measurements, but not as an application performance monitoring tool, so we're considering Datadog for that purpose. They made the final decision to use Datadog for application performance monitoring.

We are not in the setup phase for Azure Monitor yet, because we're still doing a POC for visibility, so we still have no idea on whether it'll be complex or straightforward to set up the tool.

As we are very small, we have not had the chance to contact tech support for this solution, plus we have a dedicated team from Microsoft who handles our questions and issues. Currently, we don't have an issue on Azure Monitor, but have raised issues about other Microsoft solutions, and the Microsoft dedicated team have been very supportive.

My advice to others looking into implementing Azure Monitor is that if they're working on small-scale projects and their projects fit Azure, then Azure Monitor will be the best solution for them, particularly because it is low-priced. The tool is also good when building a solution, e.g. they won't need to explore outside of it, but if they're building a multi-cloud solution, and they have a mix of on-premises and cloud, my suggestion is for them to use Datadog.

I will rate Azure Monitor a seven out of ten, because this solution has two things that we don't like, e.g. it doesn't tell you what and how it happened. It just says: "Hey, that happened", and "Go and check it". This is the reason why I don't recommend Azure Monitor, e.g. it's not a very informative tool, so we don't use it for our root cause investigation.