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Top Microsoft Azure monitoring best practices

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Effective Azure monitoring is not just about collecting metrics; it's about translating data into action. Whether you're running microservices or an enterprise-scale app, Azure monitoring best practices help ensure uptime, performance, and compliance. However, native Azure tools often fall short when it comes to unified visibility, advanced alerting, or cross-platform integrations.

What do Azure monitoring tools do?

Azure monitoring tools help collect, analyze, and visualize telemetry data from resources like VMs, containers, storage accounts, app services, and databases. Microsoft provides Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics, and Network Watcher as native offerings.

But the reality is, these tools are often siloed, requiring separate configurations and offering limited cross-platform support. That’s why many IT teams are turning to comprehensive Azure monitoring platforms like Site24x7, which unify metrics and logs under one roof and extend visibility beyond Azure.

Site24x7 supports both agent and agentless deployments, offering flexible monitoring across any environment. Plus, it scales effortlessly with minimal configuration, making it ideal for growing distributed infrastructures.

What should you monitor in Azure?

When building your Azure monitoring strategy, it's important to focus on key performance and availability indicators across your critical resources. When building your monitoring strategy, focus on critical performance and availability indicators, including:

  • Virtual Machines: CPU, memory, disk IOPS, and network throughput
  • App Service: Saturation metrics like CPU and memory, request rates, response times, and dependency failures
  • Azure SQL and Cosmos Database: DTU usage, query performance, and throttling
  • Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): Pod availability, node health, and resource limits
  • Service Bus and Event Hubs: Message latency and queue length
  • Security: Audit logs, unauthorized access attempts, and policy violations

Monitoring these components provides a 360-degree view of your Azure environment, helping you catch anomalies early and ensure compliance with SLAs.

1) Use a unified monitoring tool

A common pitfall in Azure observability is fragmented monitoring, where logs are stored in one place, metrics in another, and alerts are managed separately. This fragmentation often leads to longer mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to resolve (MTTR), especially during critical outages or spikes in resource usage.

Site24x7 addresses this issue with its Azure monitoring, offering a single-pane-of-glass view that aggregates everything you need into one dashboard. You can effortlessly monitor:

  • Metrics and logs from multiple Azure subscriptions
  • Telemetry from on-premises, AWS, GCP, OCI, and hybrid environments
  • Service status, configuration changes, network traces, and more

To simplify large-scale monitoring, you can also segregate resources by subscription, resource group, service, and location—and manage them with custom tags and alert rules—all from a single platform. This collective approach makes troubleshooting and resolution easier, helping you keep your Azure environment running smoothly with minimal downtime.

2) Understand your important KPIs and what to monitor

Not all metrics are equally important, especially when it comes to Azure monitoring. With hundreds of counters available, it's essential to focus on KPI-driven monitoring that aligns with your business goals. For instance, tracking error rates and slow response times for web apps, monitoring deadlocks and CPU usage for SQL databases, or keeping an eye on pod restart counts and CPU throttling for AKS are all KPIs that directly impact service quality. Site24x7's AI-driven recommendations help you filter out noisy metrics and focus on what truly matters by automatically identifying outliers and highlighting the most business-critical data, and default threshold profiles ensure timely alerts without manual setup.

3) Add end-to-end APM and RUM for full-stack visibility

Monitoring only back-end performance isn't enough in modern Azure environments. Native tools like Azure Monitor and Application Insights offer basic telemetry but lack the depth for tracing issues across distributed systems or measuring real user experiences. With Site24x7's application performance monitoring (APM) and real user monitoring (RUM) integrations, you can track transactions across microservices, pinpoint slow database queries, and identify code-level bottlenecks. RUM adds front-end insights like load times, Apdex scores, and browser-level issues. This combined view helps DevOps and site reliability engineer teams troubleshoot faster, optimize the user experience, and improve application reliability.

4) Build your own dashboard for custom visuals

Azure-native dashboards can often lack the flexibility needed, particularly when managing multiple regions or subscriptions. Building your own dashboard is a key Azure monitoring best practice, as it aligns metrics with your business goals, app architecture, and team roles. Unlike default dashboards with limited views, custom ones enable better data correlation; faster root cause analysis; and a unified view of performance, cost, security, and compliance. With Site24x7, you can visualize metrics side by side from Azure, AWS, on-premises, and container environments, all in one view. Plus, you can embed useful widgets like SLA compliance, anomaly reports, or ticketing KPIs, providing a more comprehensive, streamlined monitoring experience.

5) Leverage AIOps for intelligent and proactive issue resolution

Engage with intelligent insights powered by AIOps to resolve issues before they affect your production environment. Employ an AI-based anomaly detection framework to identify unusual spikes or deviations and prevent performance crises in your Azure setup. The AI-driven system automatically adjusts thresholds, eliminating the need for manual recalibration across different monitors. It analyzes the performance data of each resource, compares it with trends, and detects anomalies based on both quantitative and seasonal patterns. These insights are then categorized by severity, and you receive tailored notifications aligned with the urgency of the issue.

6) Adopt a proactive alerting strategy

Setting fixed threshold alerts can lead to alert fatigue and false positives, making it harder to respond effectively. A more proactive approach involves using dynamic thresholds that adapt based on historical usage patterns along with defining alert severity levels, like info, warning, and critical. You can also set up suppression policies during maintenance windows for noise reduction from unnecessary notifications.

7) Integrate with third-party tools for incident management

Azure Monitor has limitations to its native integrations with many popular ITSM and DevOps tools, often requiring custom scripts or logic to bridge the gap. With Site24x7, you get out-of-the-box integrations with leading platforms like PagerDuty, ServiceNow, Jira, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, making it easier to streamline workflows. You can also set up custom webhooks to connect with automation tools and ensure seamless ITIL® workflows and alert routing, saving you time and effort while enhancing your incident management process.

8) Employ self-healing techniques with IT automation

Self-healing is the future of cloud operations, and Site24x7 makes it easier to automate and manage critical Azure resources. When workloads spike, you can trigger autoscaling policies or use automation scripts to restart Azure Virtual Machines and App Service. If thresholds are breached, diagnostic scripts can automatically run on containers or resource groups, eliminating the need for manual intervention. Site24x7's IT automation also lets you orchestrate management actions, such as rerunning failed pipelines, starting or stopping VMs, and automating workflows.

9) Optimize cloud costs with a guidance checklist

Monitoring isn’t just about performance—cost control and compliance are equally critical in enterprise Azure environments. Unchecked resource sprawl, underutilized assets, or misconfigured services can quickly inflate cloud bills. ManageEngine CloudSpend’s Azure Guidance Report helps you take a proactive stance by continuously analyzing your environment for cost inefficiencies, security risks, and compliance gaps. It surfaces actionable insights such as idle VMs, unattached disks, outdated TLS versions, or missing diagnostic settings—ensuring your Azure setup adheres to best practices. With built-in checks across cost, performance, availability, security, and compliance, the Guidance Report empowers Azure administrators to make data-driven optimization decisions and stay audit-ready.

Additionally, integrating with ManageEngine CloudSpend enables you to track your Azure expenses in real time, offering actionable recommendations for rightsizing, scaling, and stopping unused services to optimize cloud spend. Together, these tools help you maintain cost-efficiency and governance across your cloud footprint.

From reactive to intelligent monitoring with Site24x7

Azure’s native tools are good, but they are siloed, limited in scope, and often lack the cross-platform intelligence modern enterprises need. If you're serious about optimizing performance, reducing resolution time, and preventing SLA breaches, it's time to rethink your strategy. Site24x7's Azure monitoring provides a unified, AI-driven, and integration-ready alternative—purpose-built for today’s dynamic IT ecosystems, including cloud-native, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.

Whether you're monitoring VMs, containers, databases, or serverless functions, Site24x7 supports both agent-based and agentless setups to suit your operational needs and preferences. Its ability to scale effortlessly across distributed systems and support both server-based and serverless workloads ensures that your monitoring capabilities grow with your business. With built-in support for automated cloud discovery, tagging, and resource group mapping, onboarding is seamless—cutting through the complexities of cloud configuration. More than just Azure, Site24x7 empowers you to extend observability across AWS, GCP, and private cloud ecosystems—delivering a single-pane view into performance, availability, and cost-efficiency across your entire digital footprint. Monitor your cloud infrastructure with an Azure monitoring solution today.

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