Azure Monitor Reviews

Our company is a service integrator and we use the solution to monitor logs, metrics, and applications for customers. We have 200 users throughout our company. 

The tools for logs and metrics are pretty good and easy to use. We can do metric monitoring, log monitoring, and prepare queries to monitor something based on  customers' requirements.  

The Kusto query language is powerful and similar to SPL. We can do a lot of things with the language. 

The solution is very easy to use and maintain. 

Alerts cannot be configured to monitor at a certain point in time. For example, we might want to alert people at zero hours but that is not possible. Splunk can accomplish this and its alerts are far better than the solution's options. The alerting mechanism is not up to the market. 

The default interface should be improved. You can prepare your own dashboard by using custom query language, but the default interface is not good. 

I have been using the solution for almost three years. 

The solution is very stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

Technical support is good and very helpful. 

Support does have some limitations or challenges because they can only help with things they know. For example, we contacted them about an alert issue because we could not log off the solution's Event Hub component. Unfortunately, they were not able to help. 

Overall, support is very helpful and provides an immediate response. When they cannot help, it is a product issue. 

I have experience with Splunk, AppDynamics, BMC Proactive Document Management, Microsoft ACCM, New Relic, and Grafana. 

The setup was challenging initially because we were not familiar with the solution. Now that we have experience, everything is easy. 

We implemented the solution in-house.

Ongoing maintenance is performed by three members of our team. 

The solution is very costly because you have to pay for various things such as adding to logs and internet alerts. 

Logging costs are very high so should be lowered. Companies who log one TB or more will have very high costs. We should be able to log in a storage account to save costs.

Splunk is also very costly. 

The best solution depends on use cases.

AppDynamics or New Relic are the best products for application performance management.

Splunk is the best for logging and the solution is the second best. 

If you have a Microsoft environment, then you should use the solution as much as possible.

Azure Metrics is free and covers a lot of features. You can set it up and use it for monitoring.

You can definitely use the solution for logging but be aware that there are costs. 

I rate the solution 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. 

We primarily use the solution for Application Insights logging, Database logging, etc. We also use it to analyze charts on the dashboard to get an overview of the issues found in the logs. The solution helps us in monitoring, analytics, and logging.

With the solution's help, we can detect database performance issues, like which tables are missing in the indexes on some columns, etc. It helps us monitor timeout in the database, such as performance issues of the queries. If the queries timeout in five minutes, we can analyze the problem with the help of Application Insights. We can detect the problem of a specific step or reason responsible for letting the application fail or crash. For example, if the application crashes during Selenium's end-to-end test on the UI, we can find the reason by going through the logs.

The solution has tons of valuable features.

They should include advanced logging on the database level in the Azure pool. Presently, we are not able to catch the transaction logs. The preview mode is available only for dedicated SQL servers and not for a database pool. They should improve this particular area of the solution. 

They should add a built-in feature for tracing the request and responses. Currently, it does not get measured automatically, and we need to write down the custom solution to check the request and the responses in the logs. They should create a log utility to log the request and send it to the Application Insights in the integration as a custom attribute. 

There should be default parameters and headers, which we can customize. It'll be beneficial because, at present, we only have responses, but not the requests. It is the solution's downside.

We have been using the solution for six years.

I rate the solution's stability as a five for the European region and ten for other regions.

I rate the solution's scalability as a ten.

A part of the setup process was straightforward. At the same time, a part of the process required some guidance because the Azure monitor evolves constantly. Most of the time, the blog post or guidance article on how to set up gets outdated quickly. Sometimes many things don't work as expected or as written in the Microsoft documentation.

If you have a solution built on Microsoft technology, go for Azure Monitor. I rate it as a nine out of ten.

We have multiple customer internet-facing applications, so we require granular control of each of the data flows. That is something this product helps with.

The ease of use and direct integration with various products have been very useful aspects of the solution that our organization has taken advantage of.

It's easy to configure and easy to integrate with other products.

The initial setup is simple.

Technical support is helpful.

The solution is very stable. 

It can scale.

The solution needs better monitoring. It requires better log controls.

At this point in time, I don't expect them to add many other features. 

I've been using the solution for six months. 

The solution is quite stable. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. We haven't had any performance issues. I'd rate the level of stability ten out of ten. 

The solution is auto-scalable. I'd rate its ability to expand ten out of ten. It's a SaaS solution and does not require manual scaling. 

Our user base is about ten individuals. We don't have any more than that on it right now. We do not require it to expand too much in the future. 

Technical support has been great. They are helpful and responsive. 

Positive

I found the initial setup process to be straightforward. 

I'd rate the ease of deployment ten out of ten. The deployment itself was fast and took maybe ten to 15 minutes. 

Just two people were involved in the deployment process. They were regular architects or technical individuals who were part of the deployment.

ONce deployed, the solution itself does not require maintenance. 

We handled the deployment in-house. We did not need any help from outside integrators or consultants. 

I'm not involved in licensing aspects.

That said, my understanding is it is affordable. 

We have a partnership with Microsoft. 

We are always on the latest version of the solution as it is on the cloud. 

I'd advise others it was quite affordable and easy to configure. 

I would rate the solution nine out of ten. 

We haven't yet implemented it in my current company. It's going to be for our clients. We're an MSP, and we'll be implementing it for some of our clients. The only thing that we're thinking about is using it for performance monitoring and storage monitoring. Its use case is most likely going to be to manage data.

We're building out a cloud plan. We're trying to pick our own. We're trying to move certain companies into the cloud. There is a debate going on about taking the Microsoft route rather than the AWS route or the Google route. If we're going to go with Azure, we would need a monitoring tool.

The only things for which our company might be using it are storage monitoring and performance monitoring. Nothing else.

In the last company where I worked about a year ago, it looked very simple. 

Its interface has room for improvement. Some of the options or some of the ways to navigate could be improved, but that's a general thing. All companies are always modifying the user interface because there's a better way to move things around or a better way to put things so that people can see the product features that they didn't know existed. For me, that's probably the biggest thing.

It's a little lacking in features. There are some things that they could do to improve it, but it's not that big of a deal for me. There's obviously competition that does a lot more, but for what we're going to be using it for, it's perfectly fine. The biggest one is probably just the user interface. There could be more advanced logging at the database level. They can also improve their query builder to allow you to search for things better, but I last used it about a year ago. They might have already changed a ton of things in the newer versions.

I've used this solution for two years. I last used it in my previous company about a year ago.

It was pretty straightforward. 

Based on my experience with Azure Monitor about a year ago, I'd rate it a seven out of ten. There are better tools with better interfaces, deeper integration into applications, and things like that, but they could have improved it, and it could be a lot more comfortable now than when I was using it.

I use Azure Monitors and Azure monitoring to monitor our applications.

It is used for balancing how your servers are working and how your servers are responding to the end user in the form of your inputs and output responses, your gate input responses and post request, and how your server is working about the workload, et cetera. We can monitor all of this by using Azure monitoring tools. There are some application insights also that we can use to put in more detailed metrics as related to the logs and the failure of the servers, and downtime, et cetera.

We like the monitoring. We can look for the downtimes and look at the log to see whenever there is a crash and all the information around it.

It's very straightforward to set up.

The solution is stable.

You can scale the product.

The pricing is less than Dynatrace.

They need to work with other cloud providers - not just Azure. We'd like them to work with clouds such as GCP, AWS, and Alibaba, for example. 

I've used the solution for quite a long while, however, recently we moved from on-premise to the cloud. 

It's quite stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The solution is scalable.

I've never used technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they would be. 

We are moving our applications to Azure Web Apps.

Earlier we used Dynatrace, however, it was quite costly.

The solution is very straightforward. It's very easy to implement. 

We can use different services by Azure, such as virtual machines or Web Apps. These are all quite frequently deployed and it's not difficult. 

We handle the initial setup in-house. 

I'm not concerned about the pricing. Actually that is handled by a different team.

It is a pay-as-you-go service. We pay as needed.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. A centralized team handles that aspect.

I'd recommend the solution to others. 

I'd rate the product eight out of ten.

My client used Azure Monitor to monitor the environment in Azure.

The feature that I found most valuable in Azure Monitor is its monitoring abilities. With Azure Monitor, you are able to monitor all of your cloud resources across multiple subscriptions in one dashboard and create solution-specific alerts that can trigger an email to the team responsible for that specific solution.

The ability to customize is endless. The majority of the data used for creating alerts does not require any agent installed, like so many other monitoring tools.

Azure Monitor is a monitoring solution that you should not miss out on the second you move workflows, solutions, infrastructure, and much more onto the cloud.

Azure Monitor is a complex product because you can use it to monitor different things, and that could be an area for improvement. Having templates by Microsoft added to it is another area for improvement.

What I'd like to be added in the next release of Azure Monitor is an overview of best practices from Microsoft and what they'd recommend users to monitor.

Assigning an alert is another feature I'd like to see in the next release of the solution. Currently, you can't assign an alert to anyone, if a server crashed and you need to assign that alert to a specific team, it's not possible.

Azure Monitor is a stable solution.

Azure Monitor is a scalable solution.

The initial setup for Azure Monitor is quite complex. If I would rate its setup from one to five, with one being complex and five being straightforward, I would rate it 1.5.

Azure Monitor is not too expensive. On a scale of one to five, with one being expensive and five being affordable and competitively priced, I'm giving the solution a four.

I have not used the technical support for Azure Monitor.

Azure Monitor relies more on your ability to collect data and make the correct queries, while on-premises solutions rely on an agent and have many templates to choose from.

Azure Monitor is a nice monitoring tool, particularly if you have the skills. I'm rating it nine out of ten, I can't give it a ten because there's still something missing in it.

We all use Microsoft in the company and we are customers of Azure Monitor. 

The product is very good for developers who want to integrate with Visual Studio. The solution provides an overview and high-level information on what hurdles to expect, and which endpoints have problems. 

If Azure Monitor wants to compete with other APM products in the industry, it has to stitch together the information and user flow. It also needs to provide all the information, as you get with Stock Trace, including details related to where the call came from and where the problem lies. That's what we'd like to see. With a solution like Dynatrace, you have a clear path and you know which calls were made before and after the problem, and where the issue occurred. That feature is lacking in Azure Monitor.

I've been using this solution for a year. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution scales easily. It's not a big deal for Azure Monitor or any other APM product.

With Azure, implementation needs to be carried out in multiple places and you need to add other things to get the information and that's a tedious process. The Dynatrace setup is much easier. 

We made a comparison between Dynatrace on-prem and Azure Monitor as to what each solution offers. Azure is great for developers wanting to integrate with Visual Studio but when it provides Azure monitoring information on the dashboard there is a lot of Google analytics. When it comes to the application performance monitoring information, Azure gives you the overview or high-level information regarding issues and which endpoints have a problem, but it doesn't give you anything in-depth at the matter level.

It's important to know what your requirements are. If you're able to put best practices in place, and need to add SBKs and turn on profiling at the meter level to look into the details, then Azure Monitor can help. But if that's not something you need, Monitor might not be the best solution for you.

I rate the solution six out of 10.