As we have already discussed the basics in Chapter 4, Networking Design and Management, let's explore it in detail. Azure Monitor is an Azure service for monitoring and diagnosing Azure resources. However, you need to know that Azure Monitor generally accesses existing (and thus old) management capabilities of the Azure platform. These capabilities are, however, first brought together in a common GUI, the Azure Monitor.

Let's look at the work in detail:

The preceding diagram shows the workflow as it is valid for general Azure resources (all Azure resources outside the compute area). The data for the monitoring is recorded at this workflow, on the infrastructure or the resource level.

Data sources at the infrastructure level are:

• Audit and/or Activity Logs: These logs contain all of the information about your Azure resource, from an infrastructure perspective. This information includes, for example, the creation or deletion time of resources.

Data sources at the resource level are:

• Diagnostics Logs: These protocols correspond to the output, the (standard) Azure diagnostics module of the various Azure services.
• Metrics: Available metrics vary by resource type. A VM represents, for example,  a statistic on the CPU utilization in percentage ready. This value is not available for a service bus queue, but metrics such as queue size or throughput are available.

In the preceding diagram, it becomes somewhat more complicated. This shows the workflow as it is valid for compute Azure resources. The data for the monitoring is recorded at this workflow, on the infrastructure, the application, or the Guest OS level. Data at the Host VM level is currently not available.

Data sources at the infrastructure level are:

• Audit and/or Activity Logs: These logs contain all the information about your Azure resource, from an infrastructure perspective. This information includes, for example, the creation or deletion time of resources.

Data sources at the application level are:

• Application Logs and Metrics: It includes the following:
  • Counters
  • Application protocols
  • Windows event logs
  • .NET event source
  • IIS logs
  • Manifest-based ETW
  • Dump files
  • Error logs for customer applications
• Diagnostics Logs: These protocols correspond to the output, the (standard) Azure diagnostics module of the various Azure services

Data sources at the Guest OS level are:

• Diagnostics Logs: These protocols correspond to the output, the (standard) Azure diagnostics module of the various Azure services

Data sources at the host VM level are:

• Metrics: The available metrics vary depending on the resource type. However, because the host VM is an Azure VM, only metrics developed for VMs are available here.

Let's move on to the next diagram. Having seen the data sources for the Azure Monitor in the first two diagram, we can now focus on the main capabilities of the service: