Top 10 Azure Monitoring Tools

‍Monitoring the performance and health of your Azure infrastructure is crucial for ensuring seamless operations and proactively addressing any issues. Azure Monitoring tools make this possible. 

With many Azure monitoring tools available, choosing the right one for your needs can be daunting. To simplify your search, we have curated a list of the top 10 Azure monitoring tools that offer robust features and functionalities to keep your Azure environment in check.

Introduction to Azure Monitoring Tools

Azure Monitoring tools enables you to monitor the performance, availability, and usage of your Azure resources and applications. It allows you to gain insights into the health of your Azure infrastructure, identify potential issues, and take proactive measures to ensure a smooth operation of your cloud environment. 

With Azure Monitoring tools, you can easily track metrics, set up alerts, and analyze logs to optimize the performance of your services and apps running on Azure.

Benefits of Azure Monitoring Tools

The Azure environment is dynamic. Therefore, you should constantly monitor the health and performance of your Azure infrastructure, apps, services, and other components to ensure optimal performance. 

Some of the benefits of Azure monitoring tools are:

• Azure monitoring tools shows your resource usage trends to find ways to reduce your expenses.
• Azure monitoring tools help you find the underlying causes of abnormalities so you can address them before they become expensive issues.
• You can improve the dependencies, Azure infrastructure, and application performance using Azure monitoring tools by identifying and eliminating bottlenecks.

These are a few advantages of Azure Monitoring. You should leverage the best Azure monitoring tools to make the most of Azure services.

Top Azure Monitoring Tools

Several cloud monitoring and management tools offer features and advantages for monitoring integrations, including Azure Monitor, Lucidity, Turbo360, Dynatrace, Datadog, New Relic, and many more.

We've compiled a list of the top 10 Azure monitoring tools to help businesses track, analyze, and optimize resources and applications.

1. Lucidity - For Cloud Storage Optimization

In the pursuit of Azure monitoring, we have seen companies mainly focus on monitoring and optimizing compute resources while overlooking the cost of storage usage and resource wastage. Lucidity is a cloud storage optimization solution that helps reduce costs and improve efficiency for block storage across major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. It reduces expenses and streamlines operations, freeing up valuable DevOps time and eliminating downtime by functioning as a noOps solution. 

With Lucidity, teams can smoothly handle demand surges and get uninterrupted storage, resulting in never-compromised disk space, even during traffic spikes.

But why do businesses need a managed disk auto-scaler like Lucidity?

We researched to determine:

• Why are managed disk auto-scalers necessary?
• Where are companies using Azure as their cloud service making mistakes?

And we discovered:

• Overprovisioning: The root volume, application disk, and self-hosted database have up to 65% overprovisioned storage. This happens because companies frequently plan for disk growth without fully appreciating the all-encompassing effects of their decisions. Infrastructure costs rise when more storage space and processing power are assigned than necessary since you are paying for underutilized or unused resources. 
  The main goal of any organization is to maintain uptime without any performance compromises. In such scenarios, overprovisioning seems a safer option as creating a separate custom tool for storage optimization means more DevOps team’s time and effort. On the other hand, utilizing CSP-backed tools proves inefficient and needs manual intervention and resource-intensive work. This decreases productivity and puts the return on investment in danger. To tackle this, you need an intelligent tool that can shrink or expand resources without any downtime whenever you want. 

• Buffer: Organizations need extra storage beyond capacity to ensure enough storage space as and when required without affecting performance. However, in such cases, it is possible to have a huge cloud bill as they are paying for what they are not using immediately. 
  Thus, improving 65% buffer capacity becomes difficult for businesses as manual intervention is needed at various stages. Also, when less storage is required, shrinkage has to be done. Despite all this, organizations face one downtime per quarter, resulting in revenue loss and decreased productivity. Moreover, this can cause significant reputational damage. 

Lucidity has an intelligent solution for overcoming such issues and assisting you in effective cost monitoring. 

Introducing Lucidity’s Managed Disk Auto-Scaler

Lucidity’s autoscaler is the cutting-edge, autonomous multi-cloud block storage layer that makes Azure-managed disks affordable, dependable, and simple to use. It can shrink and expand block storage without causing any loss of performance or downtime, eliminating the requirement for manual disk provisioning and capacity planning. 

When there is a sudden surge in traffic, or you want to control your expenses during a low period, our managed disks auto-scaler is dynamically working on the storage capacity to perform well and save more. It helps to cut your storage costs by 70% with zero downtime in just 3 clicks. It automates the storage expansion or shrinkage process to optimize resource allocation and reduce the danger of over- or under-provisioning. Thus, it lets you improve productivity, save expenses, and sustain peak performance in your cloud settings.

Wondering how it is different from Azure Autoscaler?

Azure has an autoscaler for computing and virtual machines, but it doesn’t have one for managed disks. Lucidity does! 

Lucidity's solution is curated to minimize CPU and RAM usage and prioritize workload performance. The Lucidity efficiently manages block storage management from onboarding onwards while using 2% or less CPU and RAM resources, ensure little impact on system resources.

Lucidity’s managed disk auto-scaler also works as an extra layer over your cloud deployment to ensure you never run out of disk space. Without remodeling the architecture, you can move as many applications as possible to the cloud without making any changes in coding. 

These processes all begin immediately following Lucidity's storage discovery phase. It performs a thorough storage discovery to know about the current storage plans. This report helps you understand possible saving opportunities.

One of the unique features of Lucidity's storage audit tool is its automated, user-friendly solution for a thorough inspection of block storage. It expedites the process and offers comprehensive insights into cloud expenditures, allowing customers to find possible areas for savings, in contrast to manual discovery methods or monitoring tools.

Important Features of Lucidity's Storage Audit: 

• Prevent Downtime: Traditional storage monitoring methods require manual intervention, which can cause performance problems and downtime. Lucidity's noOps disk auto-scaler removes this risk, allowing it to expand and shrink storage capacity without affecting performance.
• Disk Analysis: Lucidity conducts an in-depth analysis of disk health to give you a clear view of your current disk expenditures. This storage discovery can help you identify idle, under, or over-utilized resources. This information can help you take action, such as understanding your billing structure or how you can cut storage costs by up to 70%. 

Integrating your cloud infrastructure with Lucidity is simple and quick after the storage discovery process; it usually takes no more than 15 minutes to finish

Benefits of Lucidity

Here are some major benefits that you can get with Lucidity.

• Zero Downtime: Lucidity's auto-scaler guarantees continuous operation during cloud maintenance or storage optimization, even during abrupt workload surges or dips. This eliminates latency spikes and downtime, guaranteeing that services are always available. 
• Real-time Shrinkage and Expansion: You can concentrate on high-value work when disk utilization automatically expands or shrinks without human interaction. This maximizes productivity and resource allocation without spending time or resources on labor-intensive manual processes. 
• Save 70% or more on storage expenses: Lucidity's auto-scaler can save up to 70% on block storage expenses. Businesses can save money by optimizing resource use and removing needless storage costs for underutilized resources. 

2. Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor is Microsoft's native monitoring tool for the Azure cloud platform. It allows you to monitor the infrastructure, including databases, Azure Storage, Azure Kubernetes Service, and virtual machines. It will also assist you in optimizing your applications' availability and performance.

Azure Monitor offers a unified view of the health of your application and infrastructure with capabilities like log analytics, metrics, and alerts. Its integration with other Azure services, such as Azure Functions and Azure App Service, gives deeper insights and makes analysis easier. Azure Monitor is built on the Azure portal, eliminating the need to use any third-party monitoring tool.

3. Turbo360

Turbo360 (formerly Serverless360) is one of the best Azure monitoring tools for complex connections that have been developed on Azure. The platform contains capabilities including event triggers, alerts, diagnostics, end-to-end visibility, and unified Azure Monitoring.

Turbo360 also offers the advantage of auto-documenting your whole Azure infrastructure and providing total expense management. It supports the integration of popular notification platforms like Slack, PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams, etc. 

It also provides a selection of monitors appropriate for architects, DevOps teams, and product managers and prompt failure detection. With Turbo360's threshold monitors, restoring operations without human involvement and using Autocorrect capabilities on resource state is easy.

4. Dynatrace

Dynatrace is an automated Azure monitoring solution that examines your Azure hybrid cloud setup using the most advanced Azure monitoring features. This infrastructure monitoring tool offers suggestions to improve the system's effectiveness.

You can see hosts, virtual machines, containers, networks, devices, logs, events, and orchestration at a scale using Dynatrace. It also offers root cause analysis and AI-assisted problem detection. Dynatrace's artificial intelligence capability continuously examines billions of dependencies to deliver an accurate root cause. 

Using Dynatrace's automated deployment platform, you can get complete coverage for all applications and infrastructure in the Azure environment. The platform is a wholesome Azure monitoring solution with features like cross-team collaboration, AI support, continuous automation, sophisticated observability, user experience, and business analytics.

5. Datadog

Datadog is a cloud analytics and monitoring tool that provides real-time insights and monitoring for your whole stack. Because it provides customized dashboards and alarms, it's a great tool for teams monitoring their infrastructure and apps.

The platform continuously monitors, analyzes, and reports any issues in a dynamic environment before they substantially impact the user experience. Its capabilities are designed to expand at the speed of your Azure environment. 

DataDog provides APM, log management, network monitoring, serverless computing, real-user monitoring, and many other capabilities. It also supports real-user monitoring and sophisticated root-cause analysis.

6. New Relic

New Relic is a cloud monitoring and management solution that provides information about the health and performance of your infrastructure and applications. It provides access to real-time data, allowing you to quickly create reports and identify important problems. 

It enables you to comprehend bottlenecks, dependencies, and application performance quickly. It can include details on sluggish transactions, error rates, page load times, and a list of servers hosting the application.

Customers' data is stored in a secure Tier III, SSAE-16-certified data center. With Full-Stack Observability, you can troubleshoot, debug, and optimize performance throughout your entire stack.

7. Solarwinds 

Solarwinds Server Application Monitor is another considerable Azure monitoring tool that can simplify and ease server and application monitoring. You can use this monitoring tool to see how different applications depend on one another.

It is equipped with every feature required to monitor the vast array of services and Azure resources, in addition to other infrastructure, to obtain a comprehensive view of your system's state. Furthermore, it can incorporate Azure monitoring into the management of Linux or Windows servers, on-site servers, and the apps they host.

With the help of this platform, you can improve the performance of your application in many ways, such as transaction tracking, exception tracking, live code profiling, and root cause analysis.

8. Paessler

Another viable option is the Paessler Azure monitoring service, which includes performance thresholds and warnings to automate monitoring. You can also monitor additional networks, web services, and application-related resources.

The Paessler PRTG is a collection of resource monitors. Every customer receives the entire package; however, they can personalize the setup by selecting which monitors to enable. The amount of monitoring credits you purchase determines the cost of the service. 

This platform seeks to serve as your one-stop shop for Azure monitoring needs. One such service is the Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine sensor, which monitors every Azure virtual machine (VM) in your Microsoft Azure account and provides information on CPU utilization, including both spent and unused CPU credits. With its mobile solutions, PRTG's cloud monitoring for Microsoft Azure can easily be done while on the go.

9. AppDynamics

With another viable Azure monitoring solution, AppDynamics, you can quickly diagnose performance problems and ensure the best possible performance of your applications across entire on-premise infrastructures.

AppDynamics provides business analytics and enterprise-grade application performance monitoring. This serverless monitoring tool for Azure Functions allows you to monitor the performance of applications running as functions on Microsoft Azure. The AppDynamics .NET Agent supports Azure Functions operating on App Service plans.

After you install the agent, it will automatically find your business transactions in Azure Functions. This implies you can link functions with end-user monitoring, generate callgraphs, and obtain snapshots.

10. Site24&7

Site24x7 provides an agile, comprehensive monitoring tool supporting over 100 Azure cloud services. It finds bottlenecks in advance by obtaining real-time information on your Azure resources, including virtual machines, storage accounts, and databases. Guaranteeing ideal resource usage and offering total access to your Azure infrastructure results in enhanced productivity.

This Azure monitoring tool from Site24x7 helps find the precise source of problems, spot deviations, and fix performance problems. With the tool's assistance, you can scale your Azure services up or down to their optimal capacity. Compared to Azure's built-in monitoring tool, it is more affordable and supports more features. 

Maximize Your Azure Cloud’s Performance With the Best Monitoring Tool

Choosing the right Azure Monitoring Tool is essential for maintaining the performance and availability of your Azure resources. With the top 10 Azure monitoring tools mentioned above, you can enhance your monitoring capabilities, proactively identify and address issues, and optimize the performance of your Azure environment effectively.

Ultimately, choose the tool that best meets your monitoring needs, scalability, ease of use, integration, and cost requirements. Then, you can maximize the value of your Azure investments and optimize your cloud environment.