Azure Monitor Reviews

We use Azure Monitor to log all the activity logs and the resource logs to something similar to AWS CloudWatch. It is enabled for most of the services as it goes hand in hand with application insights.

Alerts are set up using robust metrics that we are able to retrieve from Azure Monitor, allowing us to automate and look at different rules and action groups. 

Our component configuration keeps changing. Because of this, we need to put alerts on the components to figure out who changed them and what did they changed in them.

We have been using Azure Monitor quite regularly, both for internal usage and for our customers. Customers will have to use Log Analytics in combination with Azure Monitor. 

Azure Monitor is a one-stop place to look at what's happening across all the resources. It provides a bird's eye view with histograms and gauges that we can build within IT. 

The alerting feature is also very valuable. 

Azure introduces new services almost every year. Recently, they have improved their integration with other resources, so we get even more robust data.

Unfortunately, Azure Monitor stalls quite a bit. Azure Monitor can take up to 60 seconds to bring up metrics data. That length of latency is terrible and needs to be improved. The ripple effect of one wrong configuration affects multiple resources within milliseconds. Azure Monitor then reports after more than a minute that something went wrong. To improve this, Azure should create a visual representation of what the resource configuration was and compare it to what changed.

Alerts are queries to figure out what has happened. If there was a reliable infrastructure diagram available, it could tell me where the configuration changed. Azure gives you so many logs, to understand where the change happens you have to review thousands of rows of logs.

In the cloud, there are too many resources, so you end up trying to find the needle in the haystack to determine what is actually happening. 

In future releases, I would like to see Azure Monitor improve its diagram capabilities. Azure, in the last few years, has started to provide some basic diagramming where you can visualize from an Azure point of view, what is happening at the Kubernetes cluster and how the various resources are related to each other, we still need to use a lot of third-party tools.

Imagine if an Excel sheet was thrown to you with a few thousand rows, and you were asked to determine what happened, within a minute or two, before a disaster strikes. A visualization tool is required to know what the previous configuration was as compared to the current configuration.

The solution is also reactionary and not proactive or intuitive. Azure Monitor should be able to alert you that certain changes will cause certain outcomes before making the change using futuristic infrastructure diagrams.

Lastly, I would like Azure Monitor to provide a separate portal for large operations teams, as there currently is no solution for them.

I started using Azure Monitor regularly in 2015.

The stability of Azure Monitor is good. It has not been a problem. The solution does not require maintenance. When we adopt new services, we need to configure things as part of a checklist of items. This is a minor step.

I would rate the stability a five out of five. 

Being a SaaS service, Azure Monitor is scalable. 

Customer service and support for Azure Monitor is good. I rate it a five out of five for technical support.

The initial setup of Azure Monitor is easy. The deployment took a day or two because it is available by default. It is really an out-of-the-box solution.

Our DevOps side handled the implementation of Azure Monitor themselves. 

The implementation strategy was and continues to be that whatever resources we want to monitor through Azure Monitor, we enable them. 

The ROI for Azure Monitor is poor. I would rate it a two out of five.

Because we have to use Log Analytics, in combination with Azure Monitor, it is expensive. It is expensive because the logs are getting generated for store requests across all the Azure resources. This is all that needs to be stored, and both in terms of hot and cold storage. Cold storage after 30 days, but hot storage is required for the NOC and the SOC teams, the network operations, and the security operations teams.

Typically, we do try to encourage our customers to keep at least 30 days within Azure Monitor.

I would rate Azure Monitor a two out of five for affordability.

We evaluate options through our customers' requests. We have found that Azure Monitor actually monitors every resource better than New Relic, Datadog, or Splunk.

Splunk is very good for on-premise servers. However, internally, we do not hold logs for more than 30 days, so Azure Monitor works for us. 

Azure Monitor has a lengthy latency period for dashboard alerts. Sometimes we get data in New Relic and Datadog faster than with Azure Monitor.

Anyone considering implementing Azure Monitor into their organization should consider the length of retention time required for their logs and applications. If it is beyond 30 days, Azure Monitor becomes expensive. 

Overall, I would rate Azure Monitor a seven out of ten. The features included in the solution are good, however, they lack development. They are allowing their partners to come up with good offerings, but not developing the core products themselves.

We use the solution for only production monitoring mainly, however, we are trying to engage it with the quality flows for moving the code between platforms from dev to test environments, et cetera. We'll implement this procedure afterward.

The detailed logging is great. Detailed logging is the most impressive part. Also, we are observing our cost on the live environment. We know what kind of budget is required. 

Also, we are getting all the problematic area details, so we can arrange ourselves according to the application development part. 

The alert parts are great. It's crucial for our site, just getting the alerts on time.

It's easy to set up.

It is a robust, stable product.

The solution scales well. 

We are sometimes confused about the details. We would like to have a flow in terms of how a new application should engage with Azure Monitor. We must understand: what is the most crucial part of our monitoring or support? We are not very good at it yet. 

Currently, it seems it's complicated to get the correct information in terms of what to do and how things work. Maybe it would help if they offered some guidance or written guides. For example, we say that project manager should follow their quality issues before putting the application into production. It's so complicated from their side for the project managers. Some kind of simplification is required for people engaged in the platform. 

Still, it's very new, and we will be gaining experience, and we may see much more substantial things in the future as we uncover more capabilities.

We've newly engaged with the product. We've only used it for a few months at this point. 

The solution is very stable. It's robust. The performance is excellent. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. The reliability is high. 

We'll continue with Azure Monitor.

It is a scalable solution. It's not a problem if you need to expand it. It reaches about 200 users right now. 

We do have access support and get it when we need it. We are satisfied. They are okay. 

We've also used New Relic. We moved away due to the cost. 

The solution is straightforward and very simple. It's not complex at all. We're effortlessly engaging with it. We implemented ten applications in one week.

Only two people are needed for deployment and maintenance. They are admins. 

We did not need to get the help of consultants or integrators. We handled the setup ourselves in-house. 

The licenses require a subscription based on the log file sizing.

The pricing is better than, for example, New Relic. New Relic was too costly for us. 

Based on what we see right now, I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. Maybe, as we use it more, we will rate it higher in the future. Currently, we are very new to using this product. 

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. 

I am monitoring all of my Azure Monitor and getting good reports. I can customize the reports to get the information I need. I am also getting emails about which AAS instances are down and everything in the system related to my services.

It is easy to use, scalable, and user-friendly. Microsoft has Many guides and videos to help you understand how to create and use Azure Monitor.

I have used multiple products like Webex and PRTG. Some features could be added. Azure Monitor should add SMS and APIs. We have very limited access to Azure Monitor. I usually get alerts on my phone when they are integrated with Slack.
I am not always available, but my team is. Sometimes, I am traveling and don't have access to my email, but I have Slack and other third-party projects that send me instant messages if a sensor goes down.

I have been using Azure Monitor as a customer for seven years. I have been working in my current company for the past year, but in my previous organization, we used Citrix and Azure Monitor to monitor the instances. 

The product is scalable.

We have almost 23 users, and the network security zone has four users using the solution. Currently, we are not planning to add usage.

The technical support team is good. Sometimes, there was a long waiting period. I've never faced any issues with Azure Monitor. If I’m deploying, I’m drafting a mail to the Microsoft team and receive the response after three days of purpose.

Positive

I faced many issues in my previous organization since I was a beginner in Azure, but I have no issues now. When implementing Citrix on-premises to Azure, we had some problems with adding sensors and SSL certificates.

If I have experience with Azure monitor, everything will come into word-of-mouth publishing. If I am satisfied with Azure monitoring, I will tell my colleagues in any previous organizations or anyone I’m connected with on LinkedIn.

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

Azure Monitor is primarily used to monitor your services.

The monitoring, performance, and availability of services are valuable features.

There is room for improvement in stability. 

I have been using this solution for ten years. 

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement as we discover new features and functionalities.

The initial setup is straightforward. It took us three days to set up.

Deployment is just a matter of enabling the necessary services, and we've also developed some custom configurations around it.

Managers, engineers, developers, and a combination of experts across different roles within our team are involved in deployment and maintenance.

We have seen a return on investment.

Azure Monitor, in my view, has a focus primarily on Azure's resources and services. If you treat Azure Monitoring as an individual service, then you might also want to consider using Grafana or Prometheus.

We also evaluated Dynatrace and Prometheus. We use a combination of these tools depending on the specific services and requirements.

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

For those who want to use Azure as their deployment and point model for the cloud and enabling monitoring is pretty easier compared to a third-party monitoring service.

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.

I am an Azure architect and present the solution to customers for use in monitoring infrastructures, applications, and containers.

The solution very easily integrates with Azure services and in one click you can monitor your resource. You do not need to set up any virtual machines.

The visualization of logs, metrics, and the workbook is easy. 

The solution supports services from past YAZ functions or containers.

The APM needs to be improved to compare with Dynatrace or Elastic. For example, monitoring user sessions is interesting in Dynatrace or Elastic but is not dynamic in the solution. The static view is very basic. 

The monitoring of Kubernetes clusters needs improvement to be on par with competitors. With the solution, you need to monitor the process, deployment, application, and the security inside the cluster. This is not the case with other products. 

The solution should monitor or integrate with other cloud providers like AWS or DCP. That would be valuable because some customers have multi-cloud environments so they go with third parties to accommodate their needs. Because of this, customers say the solution is not interesting for them. 

I have used the solution for four years. 

The solution is very stable. 

The solution is very scalable by design. 

I have not needed technical support. 

The setup is easy. The solution is cloud native so there is no deployment. You just configure the solution in Azure and it is ready to go. 

Configuration can take one to five days depending on the complexity of your environment. 

My customers hire Azure consultants, engineers, or infrastructure administrators for configurations.

One technician can handle ongoing maintenance. 

The solution is a pay-as-you-go consumption service and is the least expensive in the market. 

I rate pricing an eight out of ten. 

Most of my current customers are oriented to Dynatrace. 

If you use Azure as a cloud provider, then I recommend the solution. It is easy to setup and integrate.

If monitoring the performance of applications is very important to you, then I recommend Dynatrace or Elastic APM. 

The solution has improved over the years and things are coming in the roadmap like container integration. Application monitoring was improved in the past. Some things need improvement but a lot of things have improved already. 

I rate the solution a seven out of ten.