Monitoring

Monitoring your resources is vital to being able to detect issues or opportunities for performance improvements. When it comes to Azure the monitoring story can be a bit confusing with multiple different services seeming to offer similar or related solutions. In particular there is often confusion between two services, Azure Monitor and Log Analytics (part of the OMS suite). We’re going to take a look at these two services and when you would use them.

Microsoft’s Log Analytics platform, part of the OMS Suite, allows you to pull in and analyse data from a wide variety of source for your operational needs. One of these sources of data is from Azure Monitor, the monitoring solution built into the Azure platform. Azure Monitor is great on it’s own when you want to look at performance or log data for a specific resource, but when you want to look at this data across your whole estate and be able to dashboard and alert on this, you need to aggregate and analyse this in Log Analytics.