If you’re working with Microsoft Azure, you’ve probably heard of Azure Advisor and Azure Monitor. While these two tools are related to monitoring and optimizing your Azure environment, they serve different purposes and have different capabilities.
In this blog, we’ll explore the differences between Azure Advisor and Azure Monitor, and how they can each benefit your organization. We’ll delve into the specific features and use cases of each tool, and discuss how they work together to provide a comprehensive monitoring solution.
Whether you’re a cloud administrator, developer, or IT professional, understanding the distinctions between Azure Advisor and Azure Monitor is essential for effectively managing your Azure environment. So, let’s get started and take a closer look at these two important Azure tools.
What is Azure Advisor?
Azure Advisor gives specific advice and walks you through the best practices for optimising Azure resources. Azure Advisor analyses the resource setup and technique and provides recommendations to help us improve the availability, performance, security, and cost-effectiveness of Azure resources.
With Advisor, you can:
- Get proactive, actionable, and personalized best practices recommendations.
- Also, increase the performance, security, and reliability of the resources, as we identify opportunities to reduce the overall Azure spend.
- Further, get recommendations with proposed actions in line.
The recommendations are divided into five categories:
- Reliability (formerly known as High Availability): To make sure and improve the continuity of the business-critical applications.
- Security: To recognize threats and vulnerabilities that might lead to the security breaches.
- Performance: To increase the speed of the applications.
- Cost: To optimize and decrease the whole Azure spending.
- Operational Excellence: To help us achieve process and workflow, resource manageability and deployment best practices.
Azure Advisor: Glossary
Here are some terms and definitions that may be useful in understanding Azure Advisor:
- Azure Advisor: A cloud-based service that provides personalized recommendations to optimize Azure resources for performance, security, reliability, and cost-effectiveness.
- Recommendation: A suggestion or guidance provided by Azure Advisor to improve the performance, security, reliability, or cost-effectiveness of an Azure resource.
- Resource: An Azure entity that can be managed and monitored, such as a virtual machine, storage account, or SQL database.
- Advisor Score: A metric provided by Azure Advisor that measures the overall health and optimization status of an Azure subscription.
- Cost Optimization: A category of Azure Advisor recommendations that focus on reducing the cost of Azure resources.
- High Availability: A category of Azure Advisor recommendations that focus on ensuring the availability and resilience of Azure resources.
- Performance: A category of Azure Advisor recommendations that focus on optimizing the performance of Azure resources.
- Security: A category of Azure Advisor recommendations that focus on improving the security posture of Azure resources.
- Review Frequency: The frequency at which Azure Advisor recommendations are reviewed and acted upon, such as daily, weekly, or monthly.
- Suppress Recommendation: An option to hide a specific recommendation in Azure Advisor, either temporarily or permanently.
- Actionable Recommendation: A recommendation that can be directly implemented through the Azure portal or Azure PowerShell.
- Resource Configuration: The settings and parameters of an Azure resource that determine its behavior, performance, and cost.
Azure Advisor: Use Cases
Azure Advisor is a cloud-based service that provides personalized recommendations to optimize Azure resources for performance, security, reliability, and cost-effectiveness. The following are some common use cases for Azure Advisor:
- Resource optimization: Azure Advisor can help optimize resources such as virtual machines, storage accounts, and SQL databases. It provides recommendations on how to improve resource utilization and reduce costs, such as resizing underutilized VMs, deleting unused resources, or optimizing storage account configurations.
- Security: Azure Advisor can help ensure that Azure resources are secure and compliant. It provides recommendations on how to improve security posture, such as enabling multifactor authentication, configuring network security groups, or using Azure Security Center to identify and mitigate security vulnerabilities.
- High availability: Azure Advisor can help ensure that Azure resources are highly available and resilient. It provides recommendations on how to improve resource availability, such as configuring load balancing, setting up replication for critical resources, or implementing disaster recovery solutions.
- Performance: Azure Advisor can help improve the performance of Azure resources. It provides recommendations on how to optimize resource performance, such as configuring caching for web applications, enabling auto-scaling for compute resources, or using Azure CDN to improve content delivery.
- Cost optimization: Azure Advisor can help optimize Azure costs. It provides recommendations on how to reduce costs, such as identifying and eliminating idle resources, leveraging reserved instances, or selecting the most cost-effective storage options.
Now, it is time to understand what Azure Monitor is!
What is Azure Monitor?
Azure Monitor is the built-in platform monitoring setting that gives a single pipeline for observing and diagnostics data beyond all Azure resource types, enabling us to easily monitor, diagnose, alert, and report problems in the cloud infrastructure. It presents platform metrics with one minute granularity by default. Also, Azure Monitor incorporates improved alerting and notifications such as email, SMS, and webhook. While this gives platform-level telemetry, we can obtain more extensive visibility into application telemetry and operational perspicacity from Azure Application Insights and the Azure Log Analytics respectively. Together these services help us unlock complete monitoring and administration experience across the apps, platform, and workloads, all within the Azure portal.
What data does Azure Monitor collect?
Azure Monitor can assemble data from a diversity of sources. This differs from the application, any operating system, and services it relies on, down to the platform itself. Further, this receives data from each of the following tiers:
- Application monitoring data:
- Data about the performance and the functionality of the code we have written, regardless of its platform.
- Guest OS monitoring data:
- Data about operating system on which the application is operating. This could be working in Azure, another cloud, or on-premises.
- Azure subscription monitoring data:
- Data about the operation and administraton of an Azure subscription, as well as data about the health and working of Azure itself.
- Azure resource monitoring data:
- Data about operation of an Azure resource.
- Azure tenant monitoring data:
- Data regarding the working of tenant-level Azure services, like Azure Active Directory.
Azure Monitor: Glossary
Here are some terms and definitions that may be useful in understanding Azure Monitor:
- Azure Monitor: A comprehensive monitoring and analytics platform for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry data generated by Azure resources and applications.
- Telemetry: Data generated by Azure resources and applications, such as performance metrics, logs, and security events.
- Metrics: Numerical data that measures the performance or behavior of Azure resources, such as CPU usage, memory usage, or network traffic.
- Logs: Text-based data that provides information about the behavior and activities of Azure resources and applications, such as application logs, system logs, or audit logs.
- Alert: A notification triggered by Azure Monitor when a metric or log threshold is breached or a condition is met.
- Action Group: A collection of notification preferences and actions to take in response to alerts generated by Azure Monitor.
- Log Analytics: A feature of Azure Monitor that provides a centralized platform for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing log data from Azure resources and applications.
- Query Language: A powerful language used to query and analyze log data in Azure Monitor.
- Workbooks: Customizable dashboards in Azure Monitor that provide visualizations of telemetry data and insights into the health and performance of Azure resources and applications.
- Application Insights: A feature of Azure Monitor that provides real-time telemetry data and analytics tools to monitor the performance and availability of custom applications running in Azure or on-premises.
- Log Analytics Workspace: A centralized location in Azure Monitor where log data from different sources can be collected and analyzed.
- Resource Health: A feature of Azure Monitor that provides insights into the health and availability of Azure resources.
Azure Monitor: Use Cases
Azure Monitor is a comprehensive monitoring and analytics platform for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry data generated by Azure resources and applications. The following are some common use cases for Azure Monitor:
- Performance monitoring: Azure Monitor can help monitor the performance of Azure resources such as virtual machines, databases, and applications. It provides real-time metrics and logs to identify and diagnose performance issues, such as high CPU usage, slow response times, or resource contention.
- Availability monitoring: Azure Monitor can help monitor the availability of Azure resources and applications. It provides alerts and notifications when resources are unavailable, and helps identify the root cause of outages or disruptions.
- Security monitoring: Azure Monitor can help monitor the security of Azure resources and applications. It provides alerts and notifications when security events occur, and helps identify and mitigate security vulnerabilities or threats.
- Log Analytics: Azure Monitor can help centralize and analyze logs from Azure resources and applications. It provides a powerful query language and analytics tools to extract insights and detect patterns from log data.
- Application Insights: Azure Monitor can help monitor the performance and availability of custom applications running in Azure or on-premises. It provides real-time telemetry data and analytics tools to identify and diagnose application issues.
- Cost management: Azure Monitor can help monitor and optimize the costs of Azure resources. It provides insights into resource utilization and cost trends, and helps identify opportunities to optimize costs and reduce waste.
Azure Monitoring Tools
Now, let us discuss some Monitoring tools.
Serverless360
Though the range of Serverless360 is way higher than Azure Monitoring, it encourages us to keep a restraint on the health, performance, availability, and operational metrics. Once, we decided where the actual error occurred using its built-in monitors, it assists us to solve the demanding problem. For Example, Reprocessing of dead-lettered communications to a Queue or Topic once it stacked up in the queue.
Dynatrace
Dynatrace brings support and cloud, application administration, and digital experience monitoring into an all-in-one, an automatic solution that’s powered by artificial intelligence. Further, this will be largely beneficial for developers to complete Infrastructure, Application, and Cloud monitoring.
AppDynamics
AppDynamics gives end-to-end visibility into the administration of the application. They give end-user monitoring, application performance monitoring, infrastructure visibility, and business administration monitoring.
Datadog
Datadog is monitoring assistance for multi-cloud-scale applications, giving databases, tools, monitoring of servers, and services, through a SaaS-based data analytics platform.
Azure Monitor
This maximizes the supply and performance of the applications and services by surrendering an inclusive solution for gathering, analyzing, and operating on telemetry from the user’s cloud and on-premise settings.
Azure Application Insights
Application Insights are utilized to control live applications and to Identify and Analyse results in the applications. It can do aberration detections and is also intended to enhance appearance and usability.
NewRelic
New Relic Infrastructure can be practiced to monitor the Azure services based on the user question. New Relic allows monitoring settings for Cloud applications, containers, databases, servers, and Infrastructure and cloud monitoring.
Going forward, let us consider their characteristics!
Features of Azure Monitor and Azure Advisor
The Azure monitor drill into the monitoring data with Log Analytics for troubleshooting and deep diagnostics. Also, maintain operations at scale with intelligent alerts and automated actions. In addition, design visualizations with Azure dashboards and workbooks. Furthermore, it accumulates data from monitored resources utilizing Azure Monitor Metrics.
On the other hand, the Azure Advisor presents the best methods to optimize the Azure workloads, and Step-by-step guidance, and immediate actions for fast remediation. In addition, cloud score to evaluate how well-architected your workloads are. Further, alerts to inform us about new and possible recommendations.
How Advisor and Monitor can be used together to provide comprehensive monitoring and optimization capabilities?
Azure Advisor and Azure Monitor are complementary services that can be used together to provide comprehensive monitoring and optimization capabilities for Azure resources and applications.
Azure Advisor provides personalized recommendations to optimize Azure resources for performance, security, reliability, and cost-effectiveness. On the other hand, Azur Monitor provides a platform for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry data generated by Azure resources and applications.
By using both services together, users can gain a complete view of the health, performance, and availability of their Azure resources and applications. For example:
- Resource optimization: Azure Advisor can provide recommendations on how to optimize Azure resources for performance, security, and cost-effectiveness. Azure Monitor can be used to monitor the performance and availability of these resources, and to collect telemetry data to analyze resource utilization and identify areas for optimization.
- Security monitoring: Azure Advisor can provide recommendations on how to improve security posture for Azure resources. Azure Monitor can be used to monitor security events and provide alerts and notifications when security incidents occur.
- Performance monitoring: Azure Advisor can provide recommendations on how to optimize resource performance. Azure Monitor can be used to monitor resource performance in real-time and identify performance issues before they impact the end-users.
- Cost optimization: Azure Advisor can provide recommendations on how to reduce costs for Azure resources. Azure Monitor can be used to monitor resource utilization and identify opportunities to optimize costs and reduce waste.
Final Words
Azure Monitor operates by ingesting metrics and logs data from a wide variety of sources—OS, application, resources, and more—so we can analyze, visualize, and react to what’s going on with the apps. Advisor gives suggestions for Application Gateway, availability sets, App Services, Azure Cache, Azure Data Factory, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure public IP addresses, Azure Database for MySQL, Azure ExpressRoute, Azure Database for MariaDB, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Synapse Analytics, storage accounts, Traffic Manager profiles, and virtual machines. Differentiating between the both does not question their capabilities. Azure has proven their importance and worth in the market throughout the years.
