Monitoring
Azure Monitor — Product Overview
Azure Monitor is Microsoft's unified observability platform, bringing together metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards across an organization's cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments into a single place. Basic monitoring is automatically enabled the moment an Azure subscription is created, with deeper capabilities available as an organization's monitoring needs grow. Below is an overview of what it includes and the value it delivers.
Azure Monitor (Core Platform)
Designed for: Every organization running workloads in Azure, as the foundation for visibility into system health and performance.
What's Included
- Automatic collection of platform metrics and activity logs from every Azure resource, enabled by default
- Azure Monitor Logs (formerly Log Analytics), a queriable log data store using Kusto Query Language for troubleshooting and analysis
- Application Insights, providing application performance monitoring, distributed tracing, and dependency tracking for custom applications
- Prebuilt Insights experiences for common resource types, including virtual machines, containers, and networking
- Customizable dashboards and workbooks for visualizing monitoring data
- Alerts and action groups that automatically notify the right people or trigger automated responses when an issue is detected
- AI-powered Smart Detection, which learns an application's normal behavior and flags meaningful anomalies without manual threshold configuration
- Support for monitoring resources running on-premises and in other clouds, not just within Azure
Why It Matters for Your Business
Azure Monitor gives an organization a single, unified view into the health and performance of its systems, rather than piecing together information from multiple disconnected tools. Because basic monitoring is switched on automatically the moment an Azure subscription is created, businesses start with baseline visibility at no extra setup effort, and can expand into deeper application-level monitoring, custom dashboards, and automated alerting as needed. AI-powered anomaly detection is particularly valuable for smaller IT teams, since it surfaces genuine problems automatically rather than requiring staff to manually configure and maintain dozens of individual alert thresholds — helping teams catch and resolve issues faster, often before end users are affected.
Summary
Azure Monitor brings together everything an organization needs to observe its systems in one platform:
- Metrics and logs — automatic, real-time visibility into every Azure resource, plus queriable historical log data.
- Application Insights — deep performance monitoring and tracing for custom applications.
- Alerts and dashboards — proactive notification when issues arise, and clear visualizations for ongoing monitoring.
- AI-powered detection — automatic identification of meaningful anomalies without manual configuration.
Because core monitoring is included with every Azure subscription, organizations can start with essential visibility at no additional cost and expand into deeper application monitoring, custom alerting, and long-term log retention as their environment and monitoring needs grow.
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Our team can help you identify the solution that best matches your organization's needs and guide you through setup.