Skills readiness for cloud monitoring

This article is part of a series in the cloud monitoring guide.

Planning for cloud monitoring requires understanding how you'll operate your workloads before releasing them into production and continuous monitoring in a live production environment.

Business stakeholders expect services to run without disruption. Organizations often realize that their IT staff need to learn new skills and adapt to the ever-changing landscape in the cloud. Developing the necessary skills can be accelerated with several learning paths, as you see listed in this article.

Developing the necessary skills can be accelerated with the following learning paths. They're organized starting with learning the fundamentals and then divided across three primary subject domains: infrastructure, application, and data analysis.

Fundamentals

Infrastructure monitoring

Application monitoring

Analyzing monitoring data

While collecting data is a foundational piece of any environment operating in the cloud, analyzing that information is imperative to understand more about the health of your workloads and infrastructure. Review the following resources to dive in and analyze logs using Kusto Query Language (KQL).

Dive deeper

Various learning options beyond these initial options are available for developing skills.

Cloud IT roles mapping

Microsoft offers various options for all audiences to develop skills with Azure services.

  • Map roles and skills: A resource for mapping your cloud career path. Learn about your cloud role and suggested skills. Follow a learning curriculum at your own pace to build the necessary skills to stay relevant.

  • Explore Azure certification training and exams to gain official recognition for your Azure knowledge.

Azure DevOps and project management

IT teams responsible for monitoring the enterprise need to include agile training and participation in DevOps activities. This also includes following the Dev in DevOps by turning requirements into organized agile requirements to deliver minimally viable monitoring solutions refined iteratively and in line with business needs.

To learn more, review the following:

Other considerations

Customers often need help managing, maintaining, and delivering the expected business outcomes for IT services. Monitoring is considered core to managing infrastructure and the business, focusing on measuring service quality and customer experience.

To achieve those goals, lay the groundwork using IT Service Management (ITSM) with DevOps, which will help the monitoring team mature how they manage, deliver, and support the monitoring service. Adopting an ITSM framework allows the monitoring team to function as a provider and gain recognition as a trusted business enabler by aligning with the strategic goals and needs of the organization.

Consider the IT4IT reference architecture that uses a process-agnostic framework to deliver an alternative standard for transforming IT.

Learn more

To discover more learning paths, browse the Microsoft Learn training catalog. Use the roles filter to align learning paths with your role.