Microsoft brings metrics and logs together in one place with new Azure Monitor

More of Microsoft’s Azure secret sauce has been made available to the general public as Azure Monitor makes its way to public preview. For those looking for an all-in-one monitoring solution for keeping track of Azure users within a company, Microsoft is previewing its new Azure Monitor service as of today.

This preview release builds on some of the monitoring capabilities that already exist for Azure resources. With Azure Monitor, you can consume metrics and logs within the portal and via APIs to gain more visibility into the state and performance of your resources. Azure Monitor provides you the ability to configure alert rules to get notified or to take automated actions on issues impacting your resources. Azure Monitor enables analytics, troubleshooting, and a unified dashboarding experience within the portal, in addition to enabling a wide range of product integrations via APIs and data export options.”

Early Azure Monitor testers will be getting their hands on some fairly complex integration into other Azure products and services as they seek to wrangle in users on their Azure network. Some new Azure monitoring integration includes ties into viewing Activity Logs, using REST API for direct access to Metrics, viewable diagnostic logs, setting alerts, and automated control task as well as a few other linking points.

For the nitty gritty of today’s Azure announcement, senior program manager of the Azure Monitor team Ashwin Kamath walks customers through some other finer points of the future integration.

You may have the need to consume Azure Monitor data but want to analyze it in in your favorite monitoring tool. This is where the product integrations come into play – you can route the Azure Monitor data to the tool of your choice in near real-time. Azure Monitor enables you to easily stream metrics and diagnostic logs to OMS Log Analytics to perform custom log search and advanced alerting on the data across resources and subscriptions. Azure Monitor metrics and logs for Web Sites and VMs can be easily routed to Visual Studio Application Insights, unlocking deep application performance management within the Azure portal.

The product integrations go beyond what you see in the portal. Our partners bring additional monitoring experiences, which you may wish to take advantage of.”

To read more about how Microsoft enable extensibility, a single monitoring dashboard, and future resource additions, visit the Microsoft Azure blog. For anyone looking to give the new Azure Monitoring service a spin, head over to Microsoft’s Azure Monitoring documentation page to read up on the details and view a few tutorial videos before enabling the hub.