Quick answer
What business decision-makers need to know
Cloud monitoring should answer whether important services are healthy, what changed and who needs to act. Define the applications, virtual machines, databases, network dependencies and identity services that matter before building dashboards.
Key takeaways
- Metrics, logs and activity data coverage
- Resource and application health visibility
- Alert rules and action routing
- Dashboards and operational views
Monitoring starts with business-critical resources and signals
Cloud monitoring should answer whether important services are healthy, what changed and who needs to act. Define the applications, virtual machines, databases, network dependencies and identity services that matter before building dashboards.
Microsoft describes Azure Monitor as a platform that collects and analyses telemetry including metrics and logs across Azure resources. It supports alerts, Log Analytics and visualisation options, but businesses still need to decide what to collect, retain and respond to.
Capabilities to evaluate
- Metrics, logs and activity data coverage
- Resource and application health visibility
- Alert rules and action routing
- Dashboards and operational views
- Log search and investigation
- Role-based access
- Retention and data-volume controls
- Integration with ticketing or incident workflows
- Coverage for hybrid or non-Azure systems where required
- Export and reporting requirements
Design alerts around actionability
An alert should identify a condition that somebody can investigate or act on. Start with availability, capacity, failed jobs, security-relevant changes and critical application dependencies rather than enabling every available signal.
Review monitoring cost as part of architecture
Telemetry volume, retention and analysis choices can affect cloud cost. Estimate the data generated by representative workloads and review retention requirements before scaling collection across the environment.