As I wrote earlier, in the second part of the chapter I would like to tell you about the different possible solutions and offerings for monitoring that the Azure platform provides.

Take a look at the following diagram:

The key element in this overview is the Azure management portal. Each service offers its own monitoring capabilities via their respective dashboards.

Some services also have service-specific tools. This refers to tools that are installed locally but are nevertheless suitable for management and monitoring tasks in the cloud sector. The following are some examples:

• SQL Management Studio
• SQL Operations Studio
• Service Bus Explorer

Other tools that can be used to monitor your cloud are the Microsoft System Center (SC) and the Microsoft OMS. SC is a suite of tools for all conceivable management and monitoring tasks in the on-premises area. So, SC is meant primarily for your local IT, but can also be used in its functionality for the cloud.

OMS is a cloud-based solution that combines the management and the monitoring of your cloud environments, with the capabilities of the SC. The OMS can (or will) be used with an SC installation.

Finally, let's take a look at the monitoring solutions that the Azure platform itself has to offer. There are currently four of them:

• Azure Diagnostics: Azure Diagnostics is the classic offering and is used to collect diagnostic data for debugging and troubleshooting, measuring performance, monitoring resource usage, traffic analysis and capacity planning, and auditing. All data is stored in an Azure Storage account and is available for further processing. The only drawback is that Azure Diagnostics does not have its own surface for processing data. So, if you want to take advantage of the data, you have to organize your work manually.
• Azure Log Analytics: Azure Log Analytics is a tool that monitors your cloud-based, and also your local environments, to ensure their availability and performance. It collects data generated by resources in your cloud-based and local environments, as well as other monitoring tools, to enable analysis.
• Azure Monitor: Azure Monitor is a service, for monitoring and diagnosing Azure resources. However, you need to know that the Azure Monitor accesses existing (and therefore old) management capabilities of the Azure platform. These capabilities are, however, brought together for the first time in a common GUI, the Azure Monitor.
• Azure Application Insights: Azure Application Insights is an extensible for a developer-designed APM service that is available for multiple programming languages (for example, .NET, Java, or Node.js) and various platforms.