Azure monitoring checklist

Essential steps for building a reliable Azure monitoring setup

1. Understand what to monitor

Before selecting any monitoring tools, it's essential to clearly define what needs to be monitored. This will make it easier to identify the necessary KPIs related to what you're monitoring, giving clarity on what needs hands-on attention and what can be left for automation.

Monitoring infrastructure components, like VMs, containers (e.g., Azure Kubernetes Service), storage accounts, and databases, ensures system reliability and performance. Tracking application performance metrics related to KPIs, like API latency, response time, or error rates, enhances user experience while facilitating speedy issue resolution. Moreover, availability and uptime monitoring through health checks and SLA tracking help maintain service continuity and customer trust. Monitoring resource utilization metrics of areas like CPU, memory, disk, or bandwidth helps right-size workloads and lower costs. Managing logs, directories, and RBAC changes ensures security and audit readiness. Finally, monitoring cost and usage trends allows you to detect unexpected spikes, save revenue, and improve budget forecasting—leading to more efficient cloud spend management.

2. Build a balanced monitoring strategy

Start by learning about Azure's built-in monitoring capabilities to define your baseline strategy. Though Azure-native tools offer strong integration within the Azure ecosystem, they can exhibit limitations in hybrid or multi-cloud environments—or when deeper correlation and cost-effective scalability are needed. To leverage broader visibility and enriched insights, integrate third-party solutions like Site24x7 for unified monitoring across cloud and on-premises environments, real-user monitoring, AI-powered alerting, and prebuilt dashboards. This helps bridge visibility gaps, improve issue resolution, and bring a more comprehensive monitoring strategy to your Azure ecosystem.

3. Set up smart alerting for Azure

Delegate effective alerting strategies by defining meaningful thresholds—such as CPU usage consistently exceeding 80% for over five minutes—tailored to your Azure workloads across various services. To reduce alert fatigue, use dynamic thresholds powered by ML-based insights in Site24x7, which adapt to historical performance trends and evolving baselines. This ensures your alerts are both timely and relevant, helping teams respond faster without being overwhelmed by noise.

4. Display Azure health with dashboards and visualization

A single-console view of Azure resource health, performance, and availability provides granular visibility across subscriptions and services—all in one place. Get a clearer view of your Azure ecosystem that moves beyond static snapshots with prebuilt and customizable dashboards that enable dynamic monitoring for all Azure services. Obtain cross-service correlation, real-time visual insights, and multi-cloud visibility, enabling faster root cause analysis and smarter decision-making.

5. Get clarity on logs vs. metrics

It's important to make sense of both metrics and logs across your Azure environment. Have access to both logs and metrics, and know when to leverage both. Use metrics for real-time, lightweight tracking of performance (e.g., CPU, memory, latency) and logs for deep-dive insights into events, diagnostics, and audit trails. When you correlate logs and metrics across services, you'll detect anomalies faster and streamline troubleshooting.

6. Use tags for better resource grouping

Use consistent tags—like blob: prod or dev:teamA—to group Azure resources for efficient monitoring, cost tracking, and alerting. Tags simplify operations and speed up issue detection by isolating affected components and reducing noise. Leverage them to organize resources logically, enabling faster issue detection, easier management, and targeted scaling.

7. Automate remediation for incident response

IT automation is an important factor for monitoring and managing Azure resources efficiently and continuously, ensuring service reliability. Orchestrating automation to initiate recovery minimizes the need for manual intervention. Automate these workflows on your Azure resource monitors: relieving critical operations; rerunning failed pipelines; running triggers; and performing VM actions like starting, stopping, or restarting VMs. Segregate resources based on subscription, resource group, service, and location associate resources tags; regulate alerts; and automate management actions for specific monitor types.

8. Incorporate third-party integration tools

Azure-native tools provide baseline monitoring but often lack cross-platform visibility, and advanced alerting and may only support limited integration with other collaboration tools. Solutions like Site24x7 bridge these gaps by offering unified observability and seamless integration with the ITSM, collaboration, and analytics platforms your team already uses. It simplifies alerting, fosters effective communication, and improves event correlation, making it ideal for complex, multi-cloud environments that require end-to-end visibility.

9. Monitor spending with a cloud cost management solution

Managing cloud expenditures has become a critical concern given the complexity of multi-cloud environments and the expanding offering of cloud services. ManageEngine CloudSpend can help you analyze costs using filters and grouping, explore resource-level spending to identify outliers, and gain granular insights into usage patterns. Set budgets, receive alerts for overspending, and track expenses in real time. Drive cost optimization by implementing chargebacks, reserving capacity, and right-sizing resources. Plus, schedule detailed reports at the business-unit level to support informed decision-making and reduce cloud expenses.

10. Start small, iterate, and document

Successful Azure monitoring begins with focusing on your most critical workloads. Instead of overwhelming your team by monitoring everything at once, start small by identifying resources and KPIs that directly impact your business. Utilize Site24x7's customizable alert rules and dashboards to evaluate and improve your monitoring methods based on real-world data. Keeping thorough records is just as important as monitoring. Clarify what is being monitored, who gets alerted, and the escalation path for incident response should anything go awry. It's also important to create and modify runbooks or troubleshooting SOPs to make it easier for responders to take action and reduce the time needed to respond and resolve. Taking a disciplined approach will help your team develop a durable and scalable Azure monitoring strategy that can adapt as your organization grows.

Begin building a better Azure ecosystem

Starting your Azure monitoring journey as a CloudOps beginner can feel overwhelming, but with the right approach, it can be a structured and rewarding process. Remember, focus on building a solid understanding of what to monitor. Then, leverage Azure-native tools and gradually incorporate automation and third-party solutions for enhanced visibility and control.

While Azure Monitor offers preliminary visibility, effective monitoring isn't just about data collection—it's about making that data actionable enough to rely on it for performance, availability, security, and cost-efficiency insights across your cloud infrastructure. Start small, evolve with experience, and continuously refine your strategy to align with your operational goals and SLAs. Site24x7 helps you not just monitor your Azure environment—it helps you predict and prevent performance issues before they impact your users. Try Site24x7's Azure monitoring now.