The pandemic accelerated cloud migration across the world. Microsoft has come out as one of the leading players in the cloud computing market, second only to its rival AWS in terms of market share, with a steady average growth of 75-80% quarter over quarter starting from 2018 to 2020. According to a report from Flexera, about 45% of the organizations across the world are going with hybrid cloud computing strategy. With the hybrid cloud strategy, companies use a mix of public cloud, the private cloudand the on-premises infrastructure for their needs. Organizations are expected invest higher in cloud in the years to come and the Solutions Architects will be responsible for get the best outcomefrom cloud at optimal cost. To achieve this, the cloud expertshave to implement appropriate monitoring systems which can collect data, analyze and help the teams enhance the value of cloud.

In the following write up, we will introduce you to the various phases of monitoring applications in the Microsoft Azure cloud and the steps Solutions Architects must take to be successfulin the task. Towards the end of the article, you will find out how Azure training helps Solutions Architects in the implementation of monitoring strategyfor the cloud.

Implementation of Cloud Monitoring Systems – The Steps Involved

Monitoring tools are used in Azure cloud platform to identify problems and address them to improve efficiency and reduce cost. The tools help by providing greater visibility to the operations of applications and the performance of the infrastructure. With the monitoring tools, Solutions Architects can get information related to performance, security and availability of cloud infrastructure. This information can be used to make decisions that can improve operations.

The monitoring tools collect data and sort it such that the cloud professional can analyze them and get the necessary insights. Operations Manager and Azure Monitor are the suite of services from Microsoft that are used for monitoring the performance of applications and infrastructure. Apart from these, clients can also choose third-party servicesfor monitoring.

1. Set the Cloud Monitoring Strategy based on the Cloud Deployment Model

When an enterprise is implementing cloud monitoring system for monitoring applications in the Azure cloud, on-premises and hybrid cloud scenarios, it has to choose a strategy based on the how the workload is distributed across the platforms and the future cloud migration plans.

• Azure Monitor is the latest suite of services from Microsoft which can be used for monitoring infrastructure and applications that are developed completely on Azure platform.
• In Hybrid scenario where the enterprise is moving certain components of its applications step-by-step to the cloud, the team may have to work its way between Azure Monitor, the Operations Manager suite of services and the third-party tool if it is using one. Depending on the current state of affairs with the infrastructure, the idea will be to monitor resources on Azure using Azure Monitor. If the company has considerable amount of investment in Operations Manager, then it must work its way towards moving to Azure Monitor gradually.
• In another scenario, the team can move data in the form of metrics and logs to third-party on-premises tools for monitoring.

2. Developing Observability

Observability is the feature that helps the enterprise establish what is normal and what is not when it comes to operations of the applications/infrastructure. To understand what is normal, the IT team works towards getting Total Visibility of the operations. Based on the findings, the team can then develop alerts when something is not working right and later create automated solutions to take corrective measures.

3. Collecting Data

The third phase of establishing monitoring systems after setting up the strategy and creating the monitoring plan is to build tools that can collect signals which can indicate failure. The tools are designed to collect metrics and log signals that reflect failure symptoms. The team develops monitoring configuration. Professionals such as operations manager and monitoring service lead are involved in the process. The team develops the monitoring configuration based on its knowledge of failure modes, results from simulated failures and based on experience of professionals.

4. Alerting

This is one of the most important phases of establishing a monitoring system. The ability of the system to generate alerts on critical matters can determine the operational quality and efficiency of the cloud. The team working on alerts must fully understand the services or applications to be able to develop monitoring configuration and hence ensure that the system generates alerts. Once the monitoring system configuration is developed, it has to go through a run in the test environment before it is deployed. Even after the monitoring system is deployed there may be issues which are unnoticed. The team must work out ways to improve the monitoring process.

Upskill Your Team and Develop Monitoring Solutions in Azure Cloud

Your team will need a set of skills when developing monitoring solutions in the Azure certificationcloud. The implementation of the solutions will face hiccups if you do not have a proper plan on upskilling your team to ensure they are able to monitor the infrastructure. According to Microsoft, Introduction to Azure Resource Manager, Azure Policy and Azure CLI are some of the fundamental topics that will help your team learn about implementation of monitoring systems.

There are few training courses such as Microsoft trainingAzure Technologies Expert, Microsoft Azure Administrator and Microsoft Azure IoT Developer programs that touch the topic implementation of monitoring solutions in Azure.