Best Practices for ISVs using Azure Monitor

As modern ISV applications shift from on-premises to more hybrid or microservices-based models, it becomes important to evolve skill sets and adopt best practices for successful monitoring in a hybrid or public cloud environment. Azure Monitor is Microsoft’s unified monitoring solution that provides full-stack observability for applications and infrastructure. It allows you to track the health and performance of your resources, drill down to the root cause of issues, and even access actual lines of code in order to quickly fix problems and redeploy. By setting up a robust monitoring pipeline, you can detect and resolve issues before they affect your customers.

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One important aspect of effective monitoring is the concept of continuous monitoring (CM). CM involves incorporating monitoring into every phase of the DevOps and IT Ops cycles to ensure the ongoing health, performance, and reliability of your apps and infrastructure as they move through development, production, and use by customers. Azure Monitor can support CM by integrating with tools such as Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Azure DevOps, and ITSM/SIEM systems.

To make the most of Azure Monitor and achieve effective continuous monitoring, consider the following best practices:

1. Enable monitoring for all of your apps by adding Azure Monitor Application Insights SDKs to your code, or using mechanisms such as release templates, Azure DevOps projects, and extensions for non-code-based apps. This will allow you to visualize end-to-end transactions and connections across all components.
2. Enable monitoring for all relevant components of your infrastructure, including VMs, containers, storage, network, and other Azure services. Use DevOps projects, Azure policy, PowerShell, or ARM templates to scale monitoring and configure alerts for large numbers of resources.
3. Group related resources into resource groups to make it easier to monitor and manage them.
4. Use Azure Monitor’s log analytics workspace to store and analyze log data from all of your monitoring sources.
5. Configure alerts to notify you when specific conditions are met, such as when a service goes down or resource utilization exceeds a certain threshold.
6. Use Azure Monitor’s dashboards and workbooks to visualize and share data from your monitoring sources.
7. Take advantage of Azure Monitor’s integration with Azure Monitor for Containers to monitor the performance and health of containerized applications.

By following these best practices, you can ensure that you have the visibility and tools you need to monitor your hybrid or public cloud environment effectively, detect and resolve issues quickly, and deliver continuous value to your users.

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