Continually monitoring your applications is important no matter your job title, especially because today’s apps are now more hybrid. You should follow some best practices to stay on top of your infrastructure. Using tools like Azure will help you keep an eye on everything.
Check All Infrastructure Components
Often, it is hard to determine exactly which components of the infrastructure might fail. That’s why one of the azure monitoring best practices to follow is by monitoring every relevant component. By using Azure Monitor, you can track the performance and health of the whole infrastructure. You can get activity logs and metrics from many of the resources. And you also have the option to enable deep monitoring for your virtual machines. You might use PowerShell, DevOps, or other resources when it comes to getting things set up and configuring your alerts. By checking the whole infrastructure, not just part of it, you can observe everything and ensure you find potential issues as soon as they happen.
Check All Apps
It is a good idea to enable monitoring across all web services and apps. If you can, you might try adding the code, whether it is Java, .NET, Node.js, or others. That allows you to customize everything and gather information on page views, metrics, or custom aspects. Still, even if you do not use the code to add Azure, you have some options. But once you have enabled monitoring across every app, you can then start to visualize connections and end to end transactions across everything.
Ensuring Quality
Many people find that using Azure Pipelines helps them get continually deploy their solutions. There are options for helping you automate the process; from the time you commit to the code to production. If you choose to integrate these practices when you first deploy various tools. That way, you can ensure you are staying on track with your KPIs (key health and performance metrics). It also ensures that differences in your scale or infrastructure environment are not impacting the KPIs in a negative way.
You should ensure you have separate monitoring instances in the various deployment environments. Whether it is production, test, or development, this best practice ensures your data stays relevant across all infrastructures and apps. If you need to correlate it at some point, you could choose to design multi-resource charts. Or you could use Log Analytics to cross-check your resources.
Ensure You Have Alerts Set Up
If you have alerts set up, you can better monitor your strategy. It is a good idea to have actionable alerts for every type of failure you can predict. You can configure them to either dynamic or static thresholds and assign actions to them. That could include push notifications, emails, or even texts. Or you might choose to have an automated voice call go through for more important things. And you can connect that to the alert management system so team members can see them immediately. You can have auto-scaling set up as well for your alerts.
