Azure-in-bullet-points

Azure Monitor

• Allows continuous monitoring.
• Collect & analyze & act on telemetry data from cloud & on-prem environment
• It collects Metrics (e.g. CPU usage) and Logs
• Tools:
  • Insights
    • Application Insights
    • Containers
    • Virtual Machines
      • Diagnostics (Microsoft docs)
        • You can use the Diagnostics extension of the virtual machine to collect data.
        • E.g. Performance counters, Windows Events logs in Table Storage, or IIS logs in Blob storage
        • 
      • Service Map automatically discovers application components on Windows and Linux systems and maps the communication between services
        • 
    • Monitoring Solutions (easy to go monitoring setups)
  • Visualizations
    • Dashboards
    • Views (from log queries)
    • Power BI
    • Workbooks (interactive reports, dashboards on steroids)
  • Optimizations
    • Analyze
      • Metric Analytics to query metrics
      • Log Analytics to query logs
        • Uses ad-hoc query language Kusto
    • Respond
      • Alerts
        • The IT Service Management Connector (ITSMC)
          • Provides a bi-directional connection between Azure and ITSM tools to help you resolve issues faster.
          • E.g. ServiceNow, System Center Service Manager, Provance, Cherwell
          • Allows you to
            • Create work items in ITSM tool, based on your Azure alerts
              • metric alerts, Activity Log alerts and Log Analytics alert).
            • Sync your incident and change request data from your ITSM tool to an Azure Log Analytics workspace.
      • Autoscale
    • Integrate
      • Logic Apps
      • Export APIs

Application Insights

• Monitor and diagnose availability, usage & performance of web apps
• Availability tests: Alerts if your application isn’t responding, or if it responds too slowly.
  • URL tests test URL for status code or ping.
  • Multi-step tests: Test recorded sequence of URLs and interactions
  • Performance tests: Set user load & duration
  • or can run custom Azure Functions
  • 
• Profiler captures data & provides performance traces.
  • 
• Application Map
  • Helps you spot performance bottlenecks or failure hotspots
  • KPIs such as load, performance and failures, availability test failures
  • 
• Smart Detection
  • Failure Anomalies: ML based
  • Performance Anomalies
  • General degradations and issues, like Trace degradation, Memory leak, Abnormal rise in Exception volume and Security anti-patterns.
• Usage Analysis
  • Track users & user behavior.
  • what pages they’re most interested in, where your users are located, what browsers and operating systems they use.
  • Users: numbers of unique users that access your pages within your chosen time periods
  • Sessions: the number of user sessions that access your site
  • Retention
    • how many users come back & how often they perform particular tasks or achieve goals
    • show user who used any event or page view and returned to use any event or page view over x period.
  • Events
    • Send custom business events & track feature usages

  • Allows you to do A

    B Testing & measure the success of each, and then move to a unified version.

  • Funnels
    • The progression through a series of steps in a web application is known as a funnel
    • E.g. how many users are viewing the home page, viewing a customer profile, and creating a ticket
  • Cohorts
    • A cohort is a set of users, sessions, events, or operations that have something in common
    • Defined by an analytics query
    • Difference from filters: more adaptable, complex, other team members in your team can reuse them.
    • You can use template gallery e.g.:
    • Engaged Users – by Days Used
  • User flow
    • Visualizes how users navigate between the pages and features of your site
    • Starts from an initial page view, custom event, or exception
    • User Flows shows the events that happened before and afterwards during user sessions
    • Lines of varying thickness show how many times each path was followed by users
  • Impact
    • It discovers how any dimension of a page view, custom event, or request affects the usage of a different page view or custom event.
    • e.g. how load times influence conversation rates

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