Monitoring Azure Monitor

When you have critical applications and business processes relying on Azure resources, you want to monitor those resources for their availability, performance, and operation.

This article describes the monitoring data generated by Azure Monitor. Azure Monitor uses itself to monitor certain parts of its own functionality. You can monitor:

  • Autoscale operations
  • Monitoring operations in the audit log

If you're unfamiliar with the features of Azure Monitor common to all Azure services that use it, read Monitoring Azure resources with Azure Monitor.

For an overview showing where autoscale and the audit log fit into Azure Monitor, see Introduction to Azure Monitor.

Monitoring overview page in Azure portal

The Overview page in the Azure portal for Azure Monitor shows links and tutorials on how to use Azure Monitor in general. It doesn't mention any of the specific resources discussed later in this article.

Monitoring data

Azure Monitor collects the same kinds of monitoring data as other Azure resources that are described in Monitoring data from Azure resources.

See Monitoring Azure Monitor data reference for detailed information on the metrics and logs metrics created by Azure Monitor.

Collection and routing

Platform metrics and the Activity log are collected and stored automatically, but can be routed to other locations by using a diagnostic setting.

Resource Logs aren't collected and stored until you create a diagnostic setting and route them to one or more locations.

See Create diagnostic setting to collect platform logs and metrics in Azure for the detailed process for creating a diagnostic setting using the Azure portal, CLI, or PowerShell. When you create a diagnostic setting, you specify which categories of logs to collect. The categories for Azure Monitor are listed in Azure Monitor monitoring data reference.

The metrics and logs you can collect are discussed in the following sections.

Analyzing metrics

You can analyze metrics for Azure Monitor with metrics from other Azure services using metrics explorer by opening Metrics from the Azure Monitor menu. See Analyze metrics with Azure Monitor metrics explorer for details on using this tool.

For a list of the platform metrics collected for Azure Monitor into itself, see Azure Monitor monitoring data reference.

For reference, you can see a list of all resource metrics supported in Azure Monitor.

Analyzing logs

Data in Azure Monitor Logs is stored in tables where each table has its own set of unique properties.

All resource logs in Azure Monitor have the same fields followed by service-specific fields. The common schema is outlined in Azure Monitor resource log schema The schemas for autoscale resource logs are found in the Azure Monitor Data Reference

The Activity log is a type of platform log in Azure that provides insight into subscription-level events. You can view it independently or route it to Azure Monitor Logs, where you can do much more complex queries using Log Analytics.

For a list of the types of resource logs collected for Azure Monitor, see Monitoring Azure Monitor data reference.

For a list of the tables used by Azure Monitor Logs and queryable by Log Analytics, see Monitoring Azure Monitor data reference

Sample Kusto queries

These are now listed in the Log Analytics user interface.

Alerts

Azure Monitor alerts proactively notify you when important conditions are found in your monitoring data. They allow you to identify and address issues in your system before your customers notice them. You can set alerts on metrics, logs, and the activity log. Different types of alerts have benefits and drawbacks.

For an in-depth discussion of using alerts with autoscale, see Troubleshoot Azure autoscale.

Next steps