Azure Monitoring 

Site24x7's Azure Monitoring allows you to discover and monitor your Azure resources and gain insight into the key performance metrics that are critical for the healthy functioning of your Azure environment.

Get notified about any potential issues or anomalies in your Azure resources by setting up alerts when specific metrics or thresholds are breached and automate redemptive actions.

Table of contents

• Prerequisites 
• Adding a monitor
• List of services monitored by Site24x7
• Dashboards
• Logs: Activity Logs | Resource Logs
• Resource dependencies
• Bulk actions
• Monitor groups
• Alerting
• Reports
• Guidance Report
• Forecasting
• Tags
• Azure Resource Monitor page
• Azure Deployment Manager (ADM) Health Check
• IT automation
• Management Actions
• How does Data Collection (DC) happen?
• Security
• Licensing

Prerequisites:

Use any one of the three methods listed below to authenticate Site24x7 to monitor your Azure resources.

• Create and authenticate with a custom application.
• Create and authenticate with a custom application via Management Group (recommended)
  • Recommended because each Subscription is added as an individual Azure monitor which helps in better management.
• Use an existing application by using the Directory (tenant) ID, Application (client) ID, and Client Secret from the Azure portal.

Now, you can proceed to add an Azure monitor.

Adding a monitor

1. Log in to your Site24x7 account.
2. Navigate to Cloud > Azure > Add Azure Monitor. Alternatively, you can also click Admin in the left navigation pane and under Cloud Monitoring click Azure.
3. Paste the Tenant ID, Client ID, and the Client Secret Value, obtained from completing the prerequisite steps, in their respective fields.
4. Click Proceed with Resource Discovery.

Once the access is successfully granted, you will be redirected to the Site24x7 console to add a monitor.

In the Add Azure Monitor page:

1. Provide a Display Name for identification purposes.
2. Associate the monitor with existing or new Monitor Groups.
3. In the Add Azure Monitor page:
   • Select the Subscriptions you want to monitor from the list of discovered Azure subscriptions in the Subscriptions drop-down menu.
   • Toggle Auto-add New Subscriptions for Monitoring to Yes to automatically discover and add new subscriptions for monitoring.
   • Select the Resource Groups to monitor from the Resource Groups drop-down menu.
   • Toggle Auto-add New Resource Groups for Monitoring to Yes to automatically discover and add new resource groups for monitoring.
   • Select the Azure service types you want to monitor from the Service/Resource Types drop-down.
     • By default, all subscriptions, resource groups, and supported service types in your Azure account will be selected for monitoring.
   • Use the Exclude/Include Azure Resources using Tags field to mark selected Azure resources from adding or skipping from monitoring based on their tags. This field supports RegEx inputs.
   • Toggle Auto-discover New Resources to Enable to automatically discover and monitor any new resources in the upcoming discovery cycle.
     • If auto-discovery is triggered by the user from Site24x7, new resources will be discovered irrespective of the preference provided here.
4. Under the Advanced Configuration section, toggle Install the Server Monitoring Agent in VMs to Yes, to install the server monitoring extension in all the discovered virtual machines that match the filter given in the Filter to Install Agent field.
   
   

   You need a contributor role to auto-install the extension.
5. Under Resource Termination Settings:
   • Toggle Yes to Mute Resource Termination Alerts if you don't want to receive alerts when the terminated resources are automatically suspended or deleted from Site24x7.
   • Toggle Yes to Monitor Terminated Resources to ensure monitoring continues for terminated resources. The monitor will be labeled Down, and the polling will continue until manually suspended.
   • Toggle Yes to Automatically Remove Terminated Resources from monitoring. You can also choose to define a specific time period (in days) to determine how long the terminated resources should be retained in the Site24x7 web console before being permanently deleted.
     • If this field is set to Yes: The monitored resource will move to deleted state
     • If this field is set to No: The monitored resource will move to suspended state for the stipulated time period.
6. To configure Azure Activity Log Collection:
   Under Activity Logs Collection Configuration, enable Activity Logs Collection, set the Log Collection Interval, and select the Log Categories to be collected.
7. Select existing Notification Profiles, User Groups, Site24x7 Tags, or add new ones. This will apply to the resources that are added in the upcoming discovery. These will be applied to all the associated resource monitors too. For each resource, a Site24x7 Azure tag consisting of Resource Group, Location, Subscription, and Resource Type will be created. You can also integrate Site24x7 alarms with your preferred third-party service.
   The following is the tag format:
   subscription: {subscription_name}
   resourceGroup : {resourcegroup_name}
   location: {location}
   serviceType: {monitortype}
8. Under the Advanced settings, if Auto-create monitor group is set to Yes and tag key and value/value RegEx is given, a system-generated monitor group will be created along with the subgroups for each tag key-value pair.
9. Click Discover Azure Resources to start monitoring.

Dashboards

Once your Azure monitor has been successfully created, you will be directed to the Subscriptions page.

All of your Azure resources will be added to the Site24x7's user console within a few minutes.

In addition to this Subscriptions dashboard, there are three exclusive dashboards. You can also create custom dashboards, perform management actions, and detect critical anomalies.

Note

Multiple subscriptions under a single Azure tenant can be added to single or multiple Azure monitors in the Site24x7 user console. To add more subscriptions in the same tenant for monitoring, go to the Edit Azure Monitor page (Azure > Infrastructure/Inventory Dashboards/Management Actions > hover on the hamburger icon

> Edit) and select the subscriptions.

List of services monitored by Site24x7

Monitor 100+ Azure resources including virtual machines, scale sets, storage accounts, IoT Hub, and Cosmos DB.

Logs

Activity Logs

Every action that you perform in the Azure portal will be registered as a log entry. Logs will be collected in the user-preferred time-interval and will get listed on the Activity Logs page.

To get the list of Logs:

1. Go to Azure > click the Azure monitor > Activity Logs.
   
   

   The Activity Logs tab will not be visible if you have not integrated with Site24x7 AppLogs. To start collecting logs, go to Admin > AppLogs > Settings > select Yes for the option Collect application logs from servers using AppLogs.
2. Type in a query and click the search icon to search through the logs.
3. Choose a time range to show logs for a specific period.

Resource Logs

Resource Logs for all your Azure resources will be collected using Diagnostic Settings. With the help of these logs, you can monitor the operations performed within the Azure resources.

On enabling this integration, Site24x7 will create a unique resource group called Site24x7Applogs-<location> with new resources of Storage Account , Event Grid , and Function App in the location where the resource is present. Using these newly-created resources, logs will be collected from every resource present in that location in real time. Learn more about how logs are collected from Azure .

To enable this feature, go to the Azure App Service monitor and click Resource Logs. Click Enable Resource Log Collection and select the log categories to be monitored. In the next data collection, the requested logs will be collected.

Resource dependencies

Most Azure resources will be dependent or will have a dependent resource for their proper and continued functioning. This page lists all the discovered resources with the resources they are dependent on, along with their status (reason), service type, and location. Listing the dependent resources helps to find out the reason behind the downtime of the parent resource.

Bulk actions

Apply changes to multiple Azure resource monitors filtered based on their subscriptions, resource groups, types, or locations using bulk actions.

Monitor groups

1. Go to Cloud > Azure and click the Azure monitor. Click any of the service types listed in the left panel, then select the desired resource monitor.
2. Hover over the hamburger icon
   
   beside the display name, then click Edit.

In the Edit Azure Resource Monitor page under Advanced Configuration, toggle the Auto-create monitor groups option to Yes, and add filters. The Azure monitor group will be automatically created based on the given filter under the Group by Tags option.

Alerting

You can create new or associate existing threshold profiles for every Azure resource being monitored. Follow the steps below to create a threshold profile:

1. Go to the Azure resource monitor you'd like to associate with a threshold profile.
2. Hover over the hamburger icon 
   
   next to the display name. Click Edit.
3. Under Advanced Configuration > Threshold and Availability, click the plus icon (+) to create a new profile. Click the pencil icon to edit an existing profile.
4. Click Save.

Reports

Go to Reports > Azure. The reports available for Azure monitors are based on the service types available in your Azure account.

• Availability Summary Report
• Performance Report
• Health Trend Report
• Inventory Report
• Server Integration Report

Guidance Report

Get best practice recommendations to optimize costs and increase performance and reliability of your Azure resources.

Forecasting

Predict future metrics, like Azure resource usage, based on historical observations.

Site24x7 uses machine learning and traditional time series forecasting models like exponential smoothing to predict future values. To choose the right model, the time series data is broken down into systematic and unsystematic components like level, trend, seasonality, and noise. The last 30 days of historical data is used to predict your metric usage in the next 30 days.

To view the forecast charts:

1. Go to Cloud > Azure > click the Azure monitor. Click any of the service types listed in the left panel, then select the desired resource monitor.
2. Navigate to the Forecast tab to view the charts.

Supported service types: Virtual Machines (VM), Sites, Databases, App Service Plans

Tags

Tags will help you include or exclude specific resources from monitoring. Every resource can have one or more tags associated with it in the Azure portal. When resources are discovered and added for monitoring in Site24x7, the tags created in the Azure portal are automatically associated with the right resources in the Site24x7 web console.

In addition to these imported tags, you can also create new tags or associate existing Site24x7 Tags with your resource monitors for easy filtering. You also have the option to add resource groups, service types, and subscriptions as tags. 

Azure Resource Monitor page

All your Azure resources will be listed based on their service type. Select any desired service type and then a particular resource monitor. You will find five tabs on the Azure Resource Monitor page:

• Summary: View the performance metrics of your Azure resources and the last polled data of your numeric attributes.
• Configuration Details: 
  • ID - The unique ID created for each Azure resource
  • Name of the resource
  • Associated service type
  • Location
• Outages
• Inventory
• Log Report
• Server integration report

Azure Deployment Manager (ADM) Health Check

Monitor the health of your services to detect any service health issues and ensure reliable deployments and high availability of your services. Follow the steps below to start the health check:

1. Go to Azure > click the Azure monitor > ADM Health Check.
2. Select the Subscriptions and Resource Groups for which you want to perform a health check.
3. Click Copy to Clipboard to copy the JSON snippet.
4. Paste the copied JSON snippet into the health checks part of your ADM rollout JSON file.

Once completed, Site24x7 will begin the health check and verify every step of your Azure deployment(s). If successful, the deployment will move to the next service unit. If any issue is detected, Azure will stop the deployment and let you troubleshoot and reduce the scale of impact.

IT automation

Monitor your Azure resources and schedule IT automation actions when there is a breach in the configured threshold.

Management Actions

Go to Azure > click the Azure monitor > Management Actions. Under these management actions, you can perform bulk actions like deletion, re-addition, and VM actions on your Azure resource monitors. You can group or filter resources based on subscription, resource group, service, and location for better visibility.

• Delete Resources: Use the trash icon
  
    to delete a single resource. Delete multiple resources at once by using the Delete button at the top-right corner. When you delete a resource, Site24x7 will stop monitoring it, but the resource will not be deleted from your Azure account.
• Actions specific to VMs: You can Start/Stop VMs and Install the Site24x7 Server Monitoring Agent Extension for every single discovered VM. Use the Bulk Action for VMs button to perform these actions on multiple VMs in one action.

Ensure that you have provided the contributor role for the application used to create the monitor. Also ensure the VM is up and running before installing the Site24x7 Server Monitoring agent extension. 

How does data collection (DC) happen?

Site24x7 sends one or more requests for the Azure metric API of each resource and derives the data for each minute. Data collection happens every five minutes. Site24x7 analyzes the data and presents it in user-desired report or dashboard formats. If the user has set thresholds, Site24x7 checks if the derived data corresponds to the configured threshold limit. If there is any breach, an alert will be triggered and the configured remediation action will be initiated.

For resource health check:

Similarly, Site24x7 Azure monitor sends resource health API requests to Azure every three minutes and updates the status of the resources along with the data collection for further diagnosis.

Security

Site24x7 Azure monitoring is done using the OpenID Connect Authentication, a Microsoft-approved workflow. Site24x7 will neither increase the costs incurred in your Azure environment nor will it perform any modifications to the settings in place.

Licensing

The main Azure account consumes one basic monitor license. Every Azure resource uses up one basic monitor. For example, if you want to monitor an Azure account that has 10 resources, it will be consuming 11 basic monitors. For example:

Main Azure account = 1 basic monitor

10 resources = 10 basic monitors

Total = 11 basic monitors

If you have installed the server monitoring agent extension in your VMs, the VM will consume two basic monitors and the server monitor will consume two basic monitors.

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