Azure IaaS Monitoring

Azure Infrastructure as a Service, or Azure IaaS, is a Microsoft solution that provides highly scalable and automated compute resources. Microsoft manages the underlying infrastructure such as CPU, memory, and storage. You are responsible for managing the operating system, middleware, application, and data.

Before getting into the specifics of Azure IaaS, it’s important to first define IaaS in general. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) replaces your traditional on-premises data center infrastructure by providing memory, compute, storage, networking, and other related software as a cloud service instead. In practical terms, IaaS takes the form of virtual servers you can rent from a vendor who has a data center. With IaaS, you get access, not ownership—and you get a higher level of flexibility than you would with an on-prem data center.

Microsoft Azure is a public cloud vendor, offering the popular Azure IaaS option for businesses looking to move to the cloud. Azure IaaS was built to help organizations build, test, deploy, and manage applications and services through their Microsoft-managed data centers. There are many potential advantages to using Azure IaaS, which may include financial savings, scalability, and high performance for your IT deployments, reliability, stability, and supportability, as well as disaster recovery and business continuity.

The popularity of Azure IaaS means Azure infrastructure management is often crucial for organizations. For those management efforts to be successful, organizations using Azure IaaS should also have effective Azure IaaS monitoring solutions.

At a time when digital transformation is in full swing and more business-critical data and services are being deployed to public cloud environments (like Microsoft Azure), gaining deeper insights from Azure IaaS services monitoring is often a necessity.

Monitoring the health and performance of your Azure IaaS infrastructure can allow you to more easily control external resources your organization depends on for the functioning of your internal infrastructure, services, or applications. Everything from capacity issues and resource allocation to bottlenecks can go unnoticed without consistent monitoring. Since so many critical systems rely on Azure IaaS being up and running and performing well, a minor issue can have major consequences.

Advantages of monitoring IaaS services include helping you identify, diagnose, and resolve incidents affecting performance more quickly. Monitoring can also give you insight into errors, whether they’re human or machine-made, so you can detect issues and resolve them before your end users become aware. Quicker problem identification and troubleshooting also mean Azure IaaS monitoring is a great way to help businesses achieve and maintain peak application performance.

IaaS monitoring can give you the data and insights you need to better understand cloud performance and dig into the health of your Azure IaaS services. By tracking and understanding the health of those services, you can more quickly identify when there’s an issue, meaning you can act fast to target and resolve it.

While there are clearly many advantages to Azure IaaS monitoring, there are also some clear disadvantages to not monitoring Azure IaaS more comprehensively. By not monitoring IaaS services alongside other key infrastructure metrics, you may lack visibility into issues that could also be affecting the health of Azure IaaS services. Then, when you do realize there’s a problem, it will be much more difficult to identify its root cause or to troubleshoot a solution without the data and metrics collected through the monitoring process. The same is true when it comes to identifying specific errors and incidents related to your Azure IaaS services. Without effective Azure IaaS monitoring that can allow you to view and correlate the health of Azure services in relation to other key infrastructure metrics like application performance, your understanding of Azure performance will likely be limited to troubleshooting using only part of a potentially broader performance issue.

There are several features you need to look out for in any IaaS tools you consider. These include:

• Data aggregation: The tool you pick should automatically collect key metrics to help monitor the functionality of your Azure infrastructure and store those metrics in a centralized data storage space where IT team members can easily access it.
• Data analysis and visibility: On top of collecting, storing, and processing your raw data, it’s important for your Azure IaaS services monitoring solution to offer data analysis to help IT team members interpret the data. This includes highlighting the most relevant metrics in clear dashboards and connecting related metrics for faster troubleshooting.
• Alerting: Using an Azure infrastructure monitoring tool leaves your IT team free to focus their energies on other projects with the knowledge that everything is running smoothly, unless they’re otherwise notified. To get this benefit, you need an Azure IaaS monitoring solution designed to automatically send intelligent alerts whenever it detects an issue in the Azure environment.

When using Azure infrastructure monitoring tools, it’s important to choose software that will allow you to do more than monitor the above-mentioned operations. When choosing tools for working with cloud infrastructure such as the Azure service, check the correlation between performance fluctuations of the Azure infrastructure with the performance of services or applications your organization provides.

Quality Azure IaaS monitoring can help ensure that if problems do arise, you have the tools you need to resolve them quickly—often before your end users even realize there was an issue. This better positions you to make sure downtime doesn’t end up affecting your bottom line.

Other SolarWinds tools to help support Azure environment:

• Database Performance Analyzer
• Web Performance Monitor
• Pingdom^®
• NetPath™ Network Path Analysis
• Security Event Manager (SEM)
• Access Rights Manager (ARM)

Related features:

• Azure Performance Monitoring
• Azure PaaS Monitoring
• IIS Server Performance Monitoring
• Office 365 Service Performance Monitoring
• Office 365 Reporting Tool
• SharePoint Monitoring and Performance Management
• Windows Server Monitoring
• Active Directory Monitoring