Azure Classroom Series – 15/Dec/2021

Cloud Adoption Journey

• Phases

Monitoring

• Every organization intends to utilize a single system that can provide end-to-end monitoring of applications hosted on-premises and on Azure.
• Some of the organizations might want to utilize their existing SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) systems

Azure Monitoring Platform

• Microsoft Azure provides a comprehensive monitoring platform and solution to monitor all infrastructure & platform resources

• Basics

  • Logs: Azure produces extensive logging for every service. These logs are categorized as the following
    • Control/Management Logs:
      • They give visibility into the Azure Resource Manager CREATE, UPDATE and DELETE operations.
      • These logs include subscription-level and Tenant-level events and operations
    • Data Plane Logs:
      • These give visibility into the events raised when using an Azure resource
    • We can enable these logs either by Powershell, using Azure Diagnostics SDK or from Azure Portal Diagnostic/monitoring Settings.
    • Services and Resources:
      • There are different services and resources that one can create on Azure
      • Hence the collection methods and types of logs can be very different from service to service
    • Storing Logs:
      • Azure logs are stored in Azure Storage Account.
      • It may forward the Event logs to a collector system
      • Azure makes it easy to forward logs to diffreent SIEM systems if required
    • Exporting Logs:
      • For this Azure has its own set of tools or the preferred method is using a vendor specific connector

• Types of Data:

  • Fundamentally in any monitoring we have two types of data
    • Logs:
      • These are various data (generally text) in any format (txt, json, xml) which providd information releated to some activity in the resource
      • We need to have capability to search the logs to troubleshoot issues
    • Metrics:
      • Thes are point in time inforation or numerical value about system performance or other aspects of Service.
      • Depending on requirements we can do aggregations like Min, Max, Avg, Sum etc

• Experiment:

  • Lets Create a Virtual Machine. Refer Here
  • Lets look at monitoring settings of the Virtual Machine
  • We have observed Azure provides monitoring support to all the resources created.