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.

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.

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.

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 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 can be used to monitor on-prem servers. You can install the agent on a server on-premise and you can pull out whatever telemetry you want. Additionally, you can install it on servers that are on the public cloud. It's similar to hybrid solutions. However, it depends on the use case. If there's a server on-premise, you deploy the server in AWS or GCP. If the server is on Azure itself, then it plugs directly in which is a hybrid setup.

Azure Monitor can be used if you are trying to look for how all the applications are tied together, such as application mapping. It helps to know what ports are open, what services are running on certain servers as one. 

We are able to monitor CPU utilization for specific servers to determine if they are running specific types of workloads or high resource utilization type workloads. We use Azure Monitor to be able to see if the server gets to a certain threshold, such as 70 percent CPU utilization, then send an alert to the operation center or reliability center to go look at it. They could then expand or increase the CPU resource there to fix the issue. The tool is used for monitoring purposes.

Azure Monitor has helped our organization to have insights into issues and informs us before an issue becomes a very critical stage. It provides us a baseline on how to prevent serious issues in the future. You don't want it to get to 90 percent usage, if you catch it at 70 percent, it helps preserve the lifespan of that sever or allow your services to keep running efficiently or effectively. It keeps the availability of whatever service that you're running on that server, is in check. This is one of the most important parts of the service.

Azure Monitor is useful because of the useful application insights and telemetry, such as metrics and logs.

Azure Monitor could improve the visualization aspect and integrate better with other third-party services.

I have been using Azure Monitor for approximately four years.

Azure Monitor is a stable solution.

The scalability of Azure Monitor is very good because it is on a public platform.

We have approximately 500 users using this solution. We are extensively using Azure Monitor and we are always adding to it.

The support we have received from Microsoft has been good. Depending on the issue you might be facing, they could respond within less than 24 hours during business hours.

The initial setup of Azure Monitor is straightforward. The process took us approximately one hour.

We did the implementation of Azure Monitor in-house.

The price of the solution is reasonable. 

I have evaluated Datadog before choosing Azure Monitor.

I rate Azure Monitor an eight out of ten.

I am not using the product by myself. I recommend the tool to our customers. Our company's customers use Azure Monitor in their DevOps practices since it offers easy-to-monitor components. Usually, we augment the product since DXC has its own tool. In our company, we also deploy our own tools on Dynatrace. We also have our own set of tools called DXC Platform X, which gets deployed to the cloud, and the native cloud tools like Azure Monitor are augmented by our own tool.

I don't know what specific features the customer gets from the tool. I know the standard monitoring is done on Azure Monitor. In our company, aside from being active with the setup, we also take care of the notification setup so that the help desk and right people are alerted in case there is an issue.

It is not just Azure Monitor that my company deals with since we augment it with our own DXC Platform X, which DXC developed for the cloud. DXC Platform X has its own set of tools for the cloud.

It would be good if there could be an integration between Azure Monitor and Azure Arc. The integration between Azure Monitor and Azure Arc can create a different product. Using Azure Monitor and Azure Arc separately to monitor different environments can be complicated. I think there is a need to blend everything into one product so that you can monitor everything, like the on-premises, AWS or Azure with one tool.

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

The tool's pricing is very good. I could say that Microsoft offers different cost models, which are listed on the product's website. It starts free of cost and goes up to a certain level, and then one just needs to pay above that. Usually, clients don't have to pay to choose anything, which is the biggest advantage of the hosting model.

The tool is a native product of Azure. Some good integration capabilities are present in the tool. It also offers availability, and the tool's pricing is very good.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.