10 Azure Logging and Monitoring Best Practices

Logging and monitoring are essential for any cloud-based application. They provide valuable insights into the health and performance of the application, and can be used to diagnose and debug issues.

Azure offers a variety of services for logging and monitoring, and it can be challenging to know which ones to use and how to configure them. In this article, we will discuss 10 best practices for logging and monitoring in Azure.

1. Enable Diagnostic Logging

Diagnostic logging provides valuable insights into the health and performance of your Azure resources. It can help you troubleshoot issues, optimize performance, and track activity.

Enabling diagnostic logging is a simple process. You can enable it for individual resources or for an entire resource group. Once enabled, diagnostic logs will be written to a storage account that you specify.

There are many different types of diagnostic logs, so you’ll want to choose the ones that are most relevant to your needs. For example, if you’re troubleshooting an issue with a web app, you’ll want to enable web server logs.

Once you have diagnostic logging enabled, you can use Azure Monitor to view and analyze your logs. Azure Monitor provides a rich set of tools for querying, visualizing, and alerting on log data.

If you’re not already using Azure Monitor, now is the time to start. It’s one of the best ways to get the most out of your diagnostic logs.

2. Use Azure Monitor to collect and analyze logs

Azure Monitor is a built-in service that provides comprehensive monitoring capabilities for Azure resources. It includes several features that make it an ideal tool for logging and monitoring, such as the ability to collect data from multiple sources, create alerts, and generate reports.

Additionally, Azure Monitor integrates with other Azure services, such as Azure Security Center and Azure Automation, making it easy to get started with logging and monitoring in Azure.

3. Configure alerts for critical conditions

If something goes wrong in your Azure environment, you want to know about it as soon as possible so you can fix the problem. But if you’re not monitoring your Azure resources, you won’t know there’s a problem until it’s too late.

Configuring alerts is a way to get notified immediately when something goes wrong. That way, you can take action quickly to prevent any further damage.

There are two types of alerts you can configure in Azure: activity log alerts and metric alerts. Activity log alerts notify you when specific events occur in your Azure environment. Metric alerts notify you when a metric reaches a certain threshold.

You can configure alerts using the Azure portal, PowerShell, or the Azure CLI.

4. Create a custom dashboard for monitoring your resources

The Azure Portal is a great tool for monitoring your resources, but it can be difficult to get an overview of everything that’s going on at once. By creating a custom dashboard, you can add all the widgets and charts that are important to you in one place, so you can easily see what’s going on with your resources at a glance.

To create a custom dashboard, first sign in to the Azure Portal and click on the “Dashboards” blade. Then, click the “Create dashboard” button.

Give your dashboard a name and description, and then click “Create”.

Now, you can add any widgets or charts that you want to your dashboard. To do this, click on the “Add” button and select the widget or chart that you want to add.

Once you’ve added all the widgets and charts that you want, you can rearrange them by clicking and dragging them into the order that you want.

When you’re finished, click the “Save” button to save your changes.

5. Set up log retention policies

If you don’t set up log retention policies, your logs will eventually be deleted, and you’ll lose all of your data. That data is valuable for understanding what’s happened in the past and for troubleshooting issues that might occur in the future.

To set up log retention policies, go to the Azure portal and select Log Analytics. Then, select the workspace where you want to create the policy. Next, click on Settings and then Retention. From there, you can specify how long you want to keep your logs.

It’s important to note that log retention policies are not enabled by default, so make sure to set them up as soon as possible.

6. Send diagnostic data to an event hub or storage account

If you’re not familiar with event hubs, they are a highly scalable pub-sub service that can ingest millions of events per second and stream them to multiple consumers. This makes them ideal for collecting and streaming log data from your Azure resources.

Storage accounts, on the other hand, provide durable storage for your diagnostic data. This is important because it means that even if your event hub goes down, your data will still be available for analysis.

Sending your diagnostic data to both an event hub and a storage account gives you the best of both worlds: the ability to stream your data in real-time and the durability of long-term storage.

7. Review the security recommendations in the Security Center

The Azure Security Center is a central location where you can view the security state of all your Azure resources, and it provides recommendations on how to improve the security of your resources.

The Azure Security Center will provide you with information on any potential security threats that have been detected, as well as recommendations on how to mitigate those threats. For example, if the Security Center detects that one of your virtual machines is not configured correctly, it will recommend that you deploy a security update to that machine.

By reviewing the security recommendations in the Azure Security Center, you can quickly identify and remediate any potential security issues in your environment.

8. Integrate with third-party tools

The Azure platform has a lot of capabilities, but it can’t do everything. That’s why integration with third-party tools is so important for getting the most out of your logging and monitoring setup.

There are many different types of third-party tools available, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. The key is to find the right tool for the job at hand.

For example, if you need to monitor your Azure resources in real-time, you’ll want to use a tool like Datadog or New Relic. These tools provide comprehensive visibility into what’s happening within your Azure environment.

On the other hand, if you’re more interested in long-term trend analysis, you might want to consider using a tool like Grafana or Kibana. These tools make it easy to visualize your data over time, which can be helpful for identifying issues that might not be apparent in the short-term.

No matter what type of tool you choose, the important thing is that you take advantage of the wealth of information that’s available outside of the Azure platform.

9. Take advantage of Application Insights

Application Insights is a service that helps you monitor the performance and usage of your web applications. It’s designed to give you insights into how your application is being used, what errors are being encountered, and where bottlenecks are occurring.

Application Insights is easy to set up and use, and it integrates seamlessly with Azure Monitor. This means that you can get all of your logging and monitoring data in one place, making it easier to troubleshoot issues and identify trends.

Additionally, Application Insights offers a number of features that can be extremely helpful, such as:

– Queryable logs: Application Insights stores all of your log data in a queryable format, so you can easily run queries to find the information you need.
– Smart alerts: Application Insights can automatically detect anomalies in your data and send you alerts, so you can take action quickly when problems arise.
– Rich visualizations: The Application Insights portal provides rich visualizations of your data, making it easy to spot trends and identify issues.

10. Utilize Azure Advisor Recommendations

Azure Advisor is a free Azure service that analyzes your resources and provides recommendations on how you can optimize performance, improve availability, and reduce costs.

Advisor looks at your resource utilization and identifies underutilized or overutilized resources. It also analyzes your resource configuration and makes recommendations on how you can improve security and compliance. In addition, Advisor looks at your backup status and makes recommendations on how you can improve your backup coverage.

By utilizing Azure Advisor recommendations, you can ensure that your resources are optimized and running as efficiently as possible. This not only saves you money, but it can also improve the performance of your applications and services.