Azure Monitor Reviews

I am a developer who uses Azure Monitor for telemetry of the applications that I work on. Application Insights is one of those tools, and I have also used other non-Azure products before. Currently, I am using Azure on a day-to-day basis for telemetry and that kind of thing.

Specifically, I have not really dove into Azure Monitor. It has been more focused on Application Insights telemetry. I am not in operations, so it really depends on the request of the business and their use cases for monitoring applications that I implement application monitoring.

Azure Monitor is the telemetry solution, and I believe Azure Monitor is now formally known by that name. Historically it was always named Application Insights.

From a business standpoint, I think the ability to see where your users are is valuable. I also appreciate the ability to measure feature activity, see what types of devices they are on, follow specific use cases, and measure the amount of traffic going to a particular application.

I feel Azure Monitor does a fair job. I do feel it is not a streaming service in my opinion. There are advantages to having stream messaging and logging on that level. But for what it is, I feel it does well. My perspective is more based on an Application Insights agent running on a service or an app service and sending the telemetry via the agent, and also doing the filtering of telemetry at the agent level so you are not having a ton of telemetry. I believe Azure Monitor does pretty much the same thing.

I have also used tools such as New Relic, and New Relic is a much more robust tool, but that is a different product and you are going to pay for that. It is a different offering altogether.

The subscription that we had at the time allowed for a couple gigabytes of telemetry during the month, and I believe that telemetry only lives for about two months. You have to experiment with it to see how much you want to pay. I was not really involved in the pricing. It was more along the lines of we were running up against our limits in terms of the amount of free telemetry or telemetry that we get with our subscription, and so we either needed to scale back or turn specific telemetry types off or do some more sampling. It is nice that those capabilities are there so that you can reduce the amount of telemetry. I cannot really speak to pricing but I do believe that it is somewhat reasonable for Azure Monitor. New Relic is pretty expensive, I believe.

It was probably about six months, which was about two years ago.

It seemed relatively quick. Azure Gov services were a little flaky for a while. However, during the course of the project, I have started seeing the capability and reliability to be a little more stable.

Scalability is really based on the insights that can be gained based on how the APM is implemented within the application. For instance, if you have services that are running nightly or services that are running every hour, you can track the duration of how long those services run as well as how many things that are being processed within a particular run. You can gather metrics on basically whether you need to scale up or scale down, depending on volume. With APM, you can go heavy or you can go light. It just depends on what you want, what your use case is, and how reactive you want to be to system load or resilient to failure.

I actually have not ever interfaced directly with Microsoft support. I was using Azure Gov, and it has different endpoints for telemetry. It was not as straightforward as the normal telemetry endpoints, meaning that you had to be on the VPN and do all of that. When I was having connectivity issues, I would inform someone else on the team and then they would engage Microsoft support as needed.

I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.

In our organization, we use Azure Monitor for all our native Azure services. Our whole technology stack is in Azure. We use it for native services such as metrics, logs from our Azure Key Vault, Azure PostgreSQL, Azure Kubernetes, and Azure Cosmos DB, and everything similar to that.

The major challenge that remains is the costing factor for the logs ingestion. The per GB cost is more than three dollars per GB. For using services such as Kubernetes, it's very easy to integrate Azure Monitor, however, the cost skyrockets once you start using it.

Stream Analytics is something that we just started evaluating from one of our projects, however, I'm not particularly hands-on with it. As far as Azure Monitor is concerned, I do use it.

The ease of access in Azure is significant since it's native to the platform and easy to integrate. It has no maintenance overhead, and users don't have to navigate to another portal to get their desired result. It's the handiness that it has, rather than the features.

The interpretation from the logs and injection requires custom runbooks. While it's complex, many services provide native insights and workbooks. It does the basic job quite efficiently.

They added new kinds of metrics with more integrations to send out metrics. They have even added support for third-party tools that can be integrated. Azure Monitor is working on improvements and becoming more mature.

Azure Monitor is stable and scalable.

Azure Monitor is evolving with new workbooks and dashboards.

The primary challenge is the documentation.

The major challenge that remains is the costing factor for the logs ingestion. The cost skyrockets once you start using it, and there are complaints that the actual cost of the Kubernetes cluster was less than the cost they were incurring for Azure Monitor.

There should be official documentation about optimization, and users should be informed prior to opting for the service at a glance. At the initial sign-up, there appears to be huge hidden costs associated with using the service.

Azure Monitor doesn't help in resource optimization.

We have been using Azure Monitor for more than three years now.

It's complex to evaluate Microsoft technical support. The official Microsoft support is very good in the region. However, speaking from Pakistan, they have outsourced support which is very ineffective. Users end up getting no resolution from their team as they're outsourced vendors, and they don't have deeper expertise over any of the products they are referring to.

Regarding the technical support, I would rate it less than five out of ten.

Neutral

We worked with Grafana stack in parallel.

It's quite easy to set up.

The pricing of Azure Monitor rates around six out of ten.

I would recommend Azure Monitor for people who are on Azure Cloud since it's native to the platform. It's easy to spin up and doesn't have an overhead of a different portal. In the same portal, users get the alerts and additional features.

We don't technically use AI for it, so I cannot comment on this aspect.

There are other services we use, such as the cost management portal in Azure Portal, which is a separate service. We use that for cost management purposes and haven't used Azure Monitor for this purpose at all.

Overall, I rate Azure Monitor nine out of ten.

I think Azure Monitor's main use case is for monitoring purposes only. Azure Monitor itself makes the purpose clear with its name. The purpose is for monitoring.

Azure Monitor is helpful for various purposes, including Application Performance Monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, DevOps, and automation. These are the three major aspects everyone appreciates.

The alerting features definitely help in reducing operational downtime for my customers by allowing us to get notifications in advance and take active actions.

The major advantage of Log Analytics is that it's centralized for all Azure services and it provides a powerful query language. It's also closely integrated with Azure Monitor and Azure Insight.

Azure Monitor full stack visibility in managing applications' health helps with APM, infrastructure monitoring, multi-cloud monitoring, security and compliance monitoring, and DevOps and automation monitoring.

Once you set up the automation features, operational efficiency improves because automation means you have a set of tasks and alerts. Once the initial configuration is done, the job becomes easier for the support team.

The challenges with Azure Monitor are that it's initially complex to set up because you need multiple components. Azure Monitor is one thing, but within Azure Monitor, you need to bring Log Analytics data, Application Insight, create metrics, and set up alerts. All these are normally the basic work you have to do.

The initial setup can take a week or up to four weeks, depending on the scale and how big the initiative is.

The cost transparency can be improved to make Azure Monitor better.

I cannot specify a percentage, but better predictive cost modeling and a simplified onboarding process are keywords for improvement.

I have been working with Azure Monitor for five years.

There are no issues with stability; it is a stable solution.

Azure Monitor is very scalable; there are no issues with scalability for different kinds of businesses.

I have been in contact with Microsoft support regarding Azure Monitor, but we haven't specifically reached out for support on this one. Generally, they are supportive.

I would rate the support for Azure Monitor as a seven.

Positive

When working with Azure Monitor, I consider essential telemetry metrics to be anything happening on the CPU percentage change and infrastructure-level changes. It collects data from the metrics such as CPU percentage, request rate, and latency. Pretty much all Azure services are connected to Azure Monitor, allowing data collection, sourcing, and analysis.

My customers see value for money with Azure Monitor. They often don't understand why operational tools are needed until something goes wrong, at which point they realize Azure Monitor helps prevent impacts on their system.

My customers are mainly from the Big Four industries, which refers to firms such as Deloitte and KPMG.

I recommend those who plan to use Azure Monitor to better plan the architecture.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Azure Monitor a nine.

I am using Azure Monitor for monitoring our infrastructure and Azure, our clients.

I mostly need Azure Monitor internally since everything is working fine. However, there is sometimes a lack of resources. For instance, there can be a huge load on the server causing the CPU usage to go high, and the Azure application network may have issues. Occasionally, I need to scale up. Resource monitoring is essential. 

Additionally, I can conclude reports for the monthly, weekly, and peak time of the resources since all the logs are collected in the Workspace. I can access them in the dashboard reports, all due to Azure Monitor.

Azure Monitor can improve by adding some kind of storage for logs. I can get the runtime logs alone, yet if Azure Monitor can independently add one gigabyte, two gigabytes, or five gigabytes at least to log storage, I can fix the logs without syncing with Log Analytics Workspace and Sentinel. If they do that, and if they can integrate a little pricing adjustment, it will be profitable for the Microsoft tool.

I have used the solution for five years.

Basically, Azure Monitor is working fine, yet I face a costing issue as if there are a lot of logs collected in the workspace or in the center, it becomes very costly. Otherwise, Azure Monitor is adequate.

Azure Monitor is not scalable alone, yet I have to integrate other tools for collecting the logs. It is a good product, however, if Microsoft can add storage inside Monitor, I do not need to integrate any other application for collecting the logs.

If I contact the First Line Support, they seem disconnected and lack technical information. They just collect a log or screenshot, tell me they will get back, and only one or two out of ten are technical. I have to guide them. However, the second-line support is good.

There is nothing complex. I am clear about that. For ValiMen, I only need to set an alert, yet during runtime, there are hundreds of thresholds, and a layman user doesn't know what each threshold means. It can be difficult for laymen. For those working on the UI, it is very easy. For me, it is ten by ten. For a layman user, it might be five out of ten or six out of ten.

Azure Monitor is fine and bearable. However, when I export logs into the application, workspace, log analytic workspace, and into Sentinel to read reports, I need to add storage, which increases the cost. I can check the cost.

Azure Monitor can streamline my workload by providing reports. I can monitor costs, whether I am running out or under-utilizing resources. Reports enable me to reduce and scale my infrastructure efficiently. 

For example, if Aviom is running for one year with four CPUs, two CPUs might be enough. By reading analytics, I can also reduce cost. 

The overall product rating is nine out of ten.

I use Azure Monitor to monitor infrastructure. For instance, monitoring virtual machines on Azure, and I use it to monitor some management services like Azure Web Application, Azure Event Hub, Azure storage accounting, and Azure Kubernetes service. I am currently using several different use cases.

We use Azure Monitor to increase our visibility and help the company avoid disasters or application breakdowns. The operation team customizes metrics and thresholds to prevent breakdowns in applications.

I find the query language in this tool very beneficial, as it allows me to customize some dashboards and create alerts according to my thresholds and metrics. 

We can generate actions such as creating tickets in ServiceNow or sending email alerts. Another valuable feature of Azure Monitor is its integration with Azure Application Insights, which gives us a holistic view of our applications, encompassing the infrastructure and application layers.

The pricing model could be more flexible. It is not very clear, and the current model used by Microsoft for this component could be adjusted to be more customer-friendly.

I have used Azure Monitor for three to four years.

Azure Monitor is very stable. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate it as ten. We do not have any problems with stability.

The scalability of Azure Monitor is very good.

I would rate customer service an eight. It is comparable to other support from Microsoft. I have had some tickets for other components related to monitoring and application visibility.

Positive

I used other monitoring tools like Zabbix and New Relic. Zabbix is more comprehensive for monitoring infrastructure and network layers, while Azure Monitor is better for monitoring application layers.

The initial setup of Azure Monitor is very easy. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the easiest, it is a ten.

The tool is very good, but the pricing model is not clear. While it is not the most expensive nor the cheapest, it falls in the middle. Microsoft could be more flexible with the pricing model.

I have used New Relic, Zabbix, Elastic, and Grafana for specific cases.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We are in a consulting firm. Based on the requirement, we utilize our solutions. If any application requires specific monitoring, then we use Azure Monitor. We try to utilize the application functionality available, subject to the application requirements.

Azure Monitor helps us manage and monitor based on the requirements set by our clients. It allows us to provide solutions effectively.

The security and support are good. I am a part of the solution team and provide solutions related to monitoring, backup, security, and hosting for our clients.

No improvements are needed from my perspective.

I have been working with Azure Monitor as a consultant for around two years.

I would rate the stability at a nine out of ten since you cannot stop all threats. That said, Azure Monitor provides sufficient protection.

Azure Monitor is scalable from the infrastructure point of view.

Whenever we require support, we receive it, and the availability is high. I would rate it ten out of ten.

Positive

Organizations also use Azure Sentinel for better details and more options, however, we have not replaced Azure Monitor.

Setup is handled by the implementation team and is considered straightforward.

Our implementation team is well aware of the process and parameters required for deploying Azure Monitor.

Pricing is handled by the finance department, so I don't have insight into it.

Monitoring is a part of many applications with their own dashboards. We also use Azure Sentinel.

I recommend Azure to others because there are multiple service providers, however, Azure meets our requirements well. It depends on the client's needs and availability.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use the solution for the monitoring of the agent. Whatever resources we create, it will install one agent on that resource. It will collect all the matrices. It will do a detailed analysis of how much CPU, RAM, and memory should be utilized. We can get all this information by using Azure Monitor.

Azure Monitor is a very easy-to-use product in the cloud environment.

We cannot use AI services with the solution.

I have been using Azure Monitor for five years.

Azure Monitor is a very stable product, and I don't find any bugs in it.

Around 50,000 users are using the solution in our organization.

I have contacted the technical support team regarding how to use the solution, how to monitor, and what to do if we lose any logs. I am happy with the technical support team and the information they provided.

The solution’s pricing depends on how much logs it collects.

The solution is deployed on the cloud in our organization.

Most of the resources are inbuilt monitoring systems. Apart from those things, we can have more monitoring by using the analytics tools. Azure will provide the insights and analytics tool to collect data from all the resources, and we can store it in one centralized storage account.

We can analyze and do a lot of research on the logs. Azure will provide all these things, and it is a very easy-to-use product. Azure Monitor is not a standalone product. An inbuilt agent will be already running when you create any VM or machine. On top of that, we can see the logs as soon as the VM or machine is created.

The solution's documentation is very easy to understand. We can go through the documentation, and we can find the related information very quickly. Azure Monitor is very easy to use.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Azure Monitor is very good. We periodically monitor the performance of our database and servers, and we can manage that easily.

We have a lot of applications running, and we have asked our technical team to monitor their performance.

It is already integrated with many platforms. It has a lot of important export APIs, and GitHub is integrated. So, integration is not a problem with Azure Monitor.

What I like about Azure Monitor is that it performs well, is stable, and is easy to use.

We can see how much consumption is happening because it's linked to the payment. We want to know the data consumption for a period of time, and all this information is available there. It's used to monitor the data.

What I feel is when I open a screen of Azure, some places are very complex to navigate to. It is not very user-friendly when it comes to accessing certain sections. 

For example, finding the billing screen is not easy. Accessing the tabs can be complex because there is too much data on a single page.

So, it becomes difficult for someone who is not technically inclined to navigate.

So the UI could be improved.

It's been a few years, like two to three years.

At the end of the day, we have seen that it is more of a usage for us. We can monitor our applications and their performance.

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten.

Every time the version is updated, so it's scalable. Azure keeps on updating the solution, so it is very much scalable.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's a complete Azure cloud solution.

It is enabled by default. Once we deploy, we just have to trigger it. As long as we have the platform available, it comes as a default option with the subscription for Azure.

It comes with enablement already.

My team took less than an hour to set it up.

It's a very cost-effective solution. Since we are using Microsoft products, mainly built on .NET, it works very well. That's one advantage here. It's a very good ROI for us.

I have saved almost 50% of my costs compared to other cloud solutions. We are almost two years in, and we are paying every month. They are being billed, actually. We have a pay-as-you-go account. It is very good.

If we have more usage, you know, you have to pay more. If the usage is very low, for example, all my development servers are inside Azure, if my technical team is consolidating or developing the solution on their own desktop or laptop, they will not use the cloud servers. So, at that time, we are not being charged.

One thing that is actually very advantageous is that pay as you go is very helpful in curbing the cost.

Every month, we pay a licensing fee. It's cheaper. We used Google for a month or two, and it was very expensive. But when we changed the same solution to Azure, our costs were 50% less than what Google was charging us. From a pricing point of view, Azure is the cheapest.

AWS is now coming to us. They're ready to give us a solution for free for the next year. They're ready to give a free tenant to monitor our application. But at this point, we have been using Azure. It is very cost-effective compared to AWS and Google. Azure is much cheaper. It is a pay-as-you-go model. 

At the end of the day, I would say it's a very good product for us because we can monitor how our applications are performing. This is very important for us because it's our own application. 

We need to know its performance, collect data, visualize, and analyze. We can also improve our product based on the results we see from the monitor.

Any issues, we can go into the logs and trace them. We can do tracing as well. There are a lot of features.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

My recommendation:

If you use a Microsoft product, for example, if you are developing a product in .NET or other Microsoft products, you can use Azure. It's very scalable and works very well. There are many native applications in Azure Systems that can be utilized. 

For example, if you develop your backend in .NET and use an SQL database or even MongoDB, you can use Azure because it's a native competitor for Microsoft.

Our company is a premium member of Azure. Our clients use Azure Monitor effectively and we support services from Azure. At our company, we also support other Microsoft solutions, like Fabric. The tool is used for end-to-end infrastructure monitoring or VM monitoring. The performance of VMs, input/output operations, database operations, and high utilization for CPU or memory can be managed using Azure Monitor. 

There is also a notification service from Azure Monitor which lets you alert the production engineering team or managerial services team to act accordingly in case of any service breakage or failures. The solution can send notifications via SMS, phone calls, or emails. 

Azure Monitor is easily configurable and allows visibility of the entire infrastructure. The solution can be easily configured and enabled to monitor the storage, database, and VMs. 

Azure Monitor is comparatively more expensive than other tools, but it's more user-friendly, especially for administrators to configure and for our company clients to use. The solution identifies all the exceptions for the clients of our organization, then monitors the exceptions and also generates a report. The meantime to recover or resolve issues is minimal while using Azure Monitor.

The cost of the solution can be reduced so that more people can adopt it for monitoring purposes. Some challenges remain in integration with the product. At our company, on a few occasions, we have faced difficulty integrating Azure Monitor with other third-party applications. 

Azure Monitor integrates and supports other Azure solutions more easily than other vendor products. Integration with third-party tools from other vendors than Azure is more time-consuming for to analyze and obtain expected results or configurations. The solution provider should focus more on the integrations. 

I have been working with Azure Monitor for ten years. 

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. In our company, Azure Monitor is majorly used for enterprise businesses. But the solution can also be used for small and medium scale businesses. I am doubtful if a small business has the need for enhanced monitoring that the solutions offer and if they can afford the solution's cost. A small business can choose a simple or basic monitoring solution with scripting features. 

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. The solution offers high scalability. 

I would rate the tech support a five out of ten. The vendor has a good response time. The support team usually provides the knowledge base articles and solutions to resolve issues, but these resources are not effective in practically resolving the problems. The response durations depend heavily on the priority of the client and the severity of the issue raised; for high-priority clients, the solution provider can be expected to respond urgently. 

If Azure Monitor shows major errors or particular services are not running, then the support team will respond to such issues faster and suggest restarting the service. Without Azure Monitor, tasks can be carried out manually by supervising and verifying every area in rare cases when the solution stops functioning for a couple of hours. For major incidents where a huge number of clients raise issues, the support team is able to identify and resolve the issues much faster than general issues. 

Neutral

I would rate the initial setup an eight out of ten. If the deployer has experience accessing the Azure portal and the respective Azure Monitor portal, then it's extremely easy to deploy the solution. If a deployer doesn't have hands-on experience, then user guides can be used for the product's deployment process.

Usually, the deployment of the solution only takes a few minutes if the deployer is aware of the configuration details. For instance, if you want to use Azure Monitor for monitoring databases, their queries, or performance, then the respective database components need to be selected and configured as part of the initial setup. Similarly, for monitoring virtual machines, the specific virtual machine option needs to be selected along with the components to monitor during setup. 

Sometimes, our organization needs to implement a few difficult configurations for Azure Monitor, which are new and haven't been exactly configured before; in such cases, our organization uses reference documents or knowledge bases for the deployment. For the aforementioned situations, the deployment will take a couple of hours. 

It's a costly solution. 

Azure Monitor can be easily integrated with third-party services. For instance, if there are few applications that are partially operating in the cloud and on-premises, and if such applications need to be integrated on-premises for monitoring, it is possible with Azure Monitor. The solution also feasibly integrates easily with AWS platforms, databases and network or storage components. 

If certain critical services of the solution abruptly go down for several minutes, alerts are set, and technical support immediately checks specific areas before further failures occur. For some organizations, Azure Monitor provides an auto-heal feature.

In our organization, we have been successful in restoring the solution multiple times on our own by restarting the entire service or certain parts of the service in other nodes without causing any negative impact on the business. 

When there is a sudden failure of the solution, it will impact the clients, but to identify issues before the solution breaks down, our company needs to implement complex configurations and customizations.

If the VM is down, the solution will notify you, but it's possible to identify the symptoms before the VM completely breaks down. Any issues with the solution are resolved through the auto heal program or directly by the tech support team of Azure Monitor. Overall, I would rate Azure Monitor a seven out of ten. 

We use it for proactive infrastructure monitoring. It's being used for monitoring the key metrics and availability of infrastructure.

We most probably use its latest version.

It's a Microsoft native tool, so it works well with other Microsoft technologies, which is predominantly what our customer end-user base is.

Automation is a key benefit of it as well. You can link one box to automatically resolve the issues off the back of another. There's quite a lot you can do with it.

The query builder could be better. In comparison to other monitoring tools, in order to use Azure Monitor, your engineers need to have KQL experience. If they don't, it's not intuitive as a system. They need to understand KQL and get the right queries to get the value that they want, whereas a lot of out-of-the-box solutions, such as FrameFlow and Datadog, can be given to somebody untrained, and the UI will guide them through what they need to do. You lose some customization with that, but you don't need to train people on it. It would be good if Microsoft had some form of query builder in place so that you can choose a metric and it writes the code for you. Some kind of AI elements would help with that skill gap for organizations.

Their support also needs to be improved. I've had a lot of issues with their support.

I've been using this solution for two years.

I've not had any issues with it so far. I'd rate it a ten out of ten in terms of stability.

You can scale it pretty easily. I'd rate it a nine out of ten in terms of scalability. 

We probably have about 30 people using this solution.

Their support is not great. We pay for Premier Support because we're a partner, and even that's pretty bad. I've had a lot of issues with their support. It has nothing to do with Microsoft Azure Monitor as a tool. I'd rate Microsoft's support for any of their systems at the absolute lowest number that I possibly can because it's pretty bad. The time to get engineers is an issue, and their skills and knowledge are also questionable. My team is more knowledgeable than them on some of the platform-related things.

They also make a lot of mistakes. They have brought the platform down a couple of times in recent months. There has been a whole heap of stuff. I've had quite lengthy conversations with our account manager about how poor the service is, and there isn't anything they're going to do about it because it's at the organizational level. It's not one team. It seems Microsoft is going through some struggles at the moment.

Negative

We used FrameFlow. We switched to being native. It's a Microsoft native tool.

The deployment duration depends on the use case. It depends on what you want. You don't deploy Azure Monitor itself. It's not like other tools where you have to install nodes and install the software and deploy it. It comes natively with Azure as a platform, so the implementation time is just dependent on what the client wants out of it. For our use case, we set up a template of about 15 to 20 key metrics that we monitor, which probably doesn't take longer than a day to deploy. It's all templated. We just run a bunch of CLI commands, and it deploys those templates, but if you have a customer who wants to start monitoring more intricate or complex things such as SQL databases and applications, you can probably spend months on it.

In terms of the number of people required, one person can do it if he or she has the skills for it.

I don't really measure return on investment. It's about visibility. It's about providing the service for us. If we compare the implementation versus the visibility we get, we do get a return. It doesn't take that long to deploy, but it can subsequently create a lot of visibility. So, its return on investment is probably okay.

Its cost depends on the ingestion of the logs. It could go anywhere. For an out-of-the-box platform such as FrameFlow, you pay pretty much a fixed price and you get what you get, whereas, with something like Azure Monitor, you pay by the ingestion charge, so you can have one client who pays hardly anything for the same alerts, and another client pays loads and loads. From experience, Azure itself isn't a cheap system. It's not a cheap tool at all. If you don't configure it correctly, it's really expensive. I'd rate it a nine out of ten.

I'd advise learning KQL before you think about it. If you know KQL, you can do a lot with it. If you understand KQL, then it's really powerful, and you can do a lot with it. If you don't understand it, you should probably steer away from it because you won't be able to do much. You won't get much value out of it.

I'd rate Azure Monitor a seven out of ten.