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The cloud monitoring guide

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IT departments must effectively monitor applications or services in and outside Azure while maintaining optimized DevOps processes. Digital transformation allows for infrastructure, workload, and application modernization. Adopting a hybrid cloud model might be part of the migration journey from on-premises to the cloud based on business strategy.

Stakeholders often desire SaaS-based monitoring and management tools for cloud solutions. Understanding available services is crucial to achieving end-to-end visibility, cost reduction, and less focus on traditional IT operations tools.

This article is part of a series. The following articles are meant to be read together, in this order:

  • Monitoring platforms overview: Make informed decisions for cloud monitoring in Azure and hybrid environments. Learn about infrastructure requirements, data collection options, health monitoring, alerting, analyzing monitoring data, and how to extend the base platform.

  • Cloud monitoring strategy: Understand high-level modeling, how monitoring informs your strategy, and considerations for scale, privacy, and security. Also, explore how to formulate monitoring requirements and establish minimum governance and readiness.

  • Monitoring platform strategy for cloud deployment models: Discover recommended monitoring strategies for Azure, hybrid environments, or private clouds like Azure Stack.

  • Observability: Learn about observability and why it's crucial. Consider the monitoring plan, the business, service, and technology perspectives, and the key considerations.

  • Service Level Objectives: Discover what purpose SLOs serve and what approach you can take to establish them. Learn more about the types of SLOs, how to define them, and their considerations.

  • Collect the right data: Dive into how to collect the right data and considerations for developing monitoring configurations.

  • Response: Explore the response discipline, which is a result of defining one or more actions based on data-driven decisions from monitoring.

  • Relevant skills: Understand the necessary skills for cloud monitoring.

The articles in this guide aren't how-to articles for individual Azure services and solutions. Instead, it references those sources when applicable.

Audience

This guide provides a reference for enterprise decision-makers, IT managers and administrators, IT operations, IT security and compliance, application architects, workload development owners, and developers.

Next steps

Monitoring strategy for cloud deployment models