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Workload management and monitoring

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This guidance uses a federated model to explain how workload teams can operationally maintain and monitor their workloads.

Workload management and monitoring design considerations

To plan for workload management and monitoring, consider the following factors:

  • Workload monitoring in dedicated Azure Monitor Logs workspaces.

    For workloads that are deployed to virtual machines (VMs), store logs relative to dedicated Azure Monitor Logs workspaces. Workload team members can access logs for their workloads or VMs according to their Azure role-based access control (RBAC) roles.

  • Sovereign workloads that drive the use of dedicated Azure Monitor Logs workspaces.

    For sovereign workloads that require customer-managed keys to encrypt data, you can provide a high level of security and control. Data is encrypted twice. Microsoft-managed or customer-managed keys encrypt data at the service level. Two encryption algorithms and two keys encrypt data at the infrastructure level. For more information, see Dedicated clusters.

  • Performance and health monitoring for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) resources. Data is encrypted twice: once at the service level by using Microsoft-managed keys or customer-managed keys, and once at the infrastructure level by using two different encryption keys and algorithms.

  • Data aggregation across all workload components.

  • Health modeling and operationalization:

    • How to measure the health of the workload and its subsystems.
    • A traffic-light model to represent health.
    • How to respond to failures across workload components.

For more information, see Cloud monitoring guide: Monitoring strategy for cloud deployment models.

Workload management and monitoring recommendations

You can use centralized Azure Monitor components to manage and monitor workloads:

  • Use a centralized Azure Monitor Logs workspace to collect logs and metrics from IaaS and PaaS workload resources.

  • Control workspace and log access with Azure RBAC. For more information, see Azure Monitor access control overview.

  • Use Azure Monitor Metrics for time-sensitive analysis.

    Azure Monitor stores metrics in a time-series database optimized to analyze time-stamped data. Metrics are well suited for alerts and detecting issues quickly. Metrics can also monitor system performance. You can combine metrics with logs to identify the root causes of issues.

  • Use Azure Monitor Logs for insights and reporting.

    Logs contain different types of data organized into records with different sets of properties. Logs are useful for analyzing complex data from a range of sources, such as performance data, events, and traces. If necessary, use shared storage accounts in the landing zone for Azure diagnostic extension log storage.

  • Use Azure Monitor alerts for generating operational alerts. Azure Monitor alerts unify metric and log alerts, and use features like actions and smart groups for advanced management and remediation.

For more workload management considerations and recommendations, see Operational excellence in the Azure Well-Architected Framework.