Top 10 Azure monitoring tools for modern integration

There are tons of monitoring tools in the market, and each of those will have a specific problem to solve with unique features. So, in this article, I have listed the top Azure monitoring tools and their essential features and benefits. Read it till the end to figure out the best one for your business.

Azure Monitor

When it comes to native monitoring tools, Azure Monitor has become the first choice for most. It provides all the essential features that an individual would need to monitor the performance and availability of their Azure resources.

Azure Monitor collects data from various resources in the form of logs and metrics to analyze, which eventually helps troubleshoot issues even faster.

Features

• Visualize all the monitored data in one place using Dashboards
• Application insights feature helps to detect and solve issues automatically
• Perform deep diagnosis on the monitoring data with Log Analytics
• Configure alerts to get proactively notified
• Get monitoring reports on individual Azure resources

Verdict: Though Azure Monitor satisfies all the basic needs; it doesn’t meet the real-time business demands. It lags without features to provide application visibility, end-to-end tracking, consolidated reporting, health status monitoring, etc.

In this case, I have listed a few other top monitoring tools that can be an excellent alternative for Azure Monitor.

Let’s start with Serverless360, which addresses all the above pain points in using Azure Monitor.

Serverless360

There is no one-stop solution could empower the less experienced L1 or L2 Azure support and admin team to resolve complex technical incidents without escalating to DevOps and Architect teams. Serverless360 is built to fulfil this need.

With that, your Azure expert team can spend time innovating and building the Azure applications without concentrating on the low valued yet inevitable support tasks.

Serverless360 is crafted with three core modules that could help address challenges like lack of application visibility, no deep integrated tooling, lack of advanced monitoring features, end-to-end message tracking, Governance and Audit limitations, RBAC limitations and more.

Features

• Business Applications:It groups all the siloed Azure resources in a business context to provide application-level management and monitoring.

• Business Activity Monitoring: Now with Serverless360’s BAM, end-to-end distributed tracing is made easily possible to provide you complete visibility into the business transactions of your Azure or hybrid integrations.

This eliminates the need for building custom solutions to get a business-like view across your business transactions.

• Azure Documenter:Autogenerate documentations on your Azure resource usage within minutes. The generated documents can be either published online or downloaded offline as PDFs for further use.

It is one of the best Azure documentation generator tool that can help you assess the usage of resources and the total cost spent for making strategic decisions.

• Monitoring rules to monitor the resources based on property, metric and status.
• Automate day-to-day tasks with an advanced operational toolset
• It is possible to Repair and Resubmit dead-lettered messages and events
• Manage your resources as in a business applications context
• Auto-healing, root cause analysis, generating alerts, reporting via preferred channels are some of its other significant features.

Many more valuable features might excite you! Go ahead book a product demo here for a walk through in detail.

Verdict: The critical thing to note about Serverless360 is that it is not just a performance monitoring tool like others available in the market. Instead, Serverless360 brings operations, monitoring, and logging under one hood for the support team.

Pricing: Offers a 15-day free trial. Know more pricing details

App Dynamics

App Dynamics makes Azure Monitoring much simpler with enterprise-grade features to monitor and provide real-time analytics into the performance of your integrations.

Features:

• Custom dashboards to provide complete visualization on the performance of your Azure applications
• It supports application performance monitoring along with alerting and advanced AI-powered root cause analysis
• View both your application and business performance metrics together in one place to make investment decisions
• It supports all three deployment models – Cloud, SaaS, and Web-based

Verdict: App Dynamics is one of the practical tools to manage and monitor the performance of complex Azure applications, which detects and notifies you of any unexpected anomalies, eventually reducing the downtime of your solution.

Price: Offers a 15-day free trial. To start with, it has four pricing plans – Infrastructure Monitoring Edition, Premium Edition, Enterprise Edition and Real-User Monitoring.

Dynatrace

An AI-powered solution provides advanced observability for your entire Azure environment. Dynatrace also becomes unique by offering the following functionalities – Intelligent Observability, Continuous Automation, AI assistance, Cross-team collaboration, User Experience & Business Analytics.

Features:

• Getfull-stack observability on metrics, logs and traces across your environment
• It provides visibility at scale for hosts, VMs, containers and orchestration, network, devices, logs, events, and more
• Auto-discovery and Continuous Mapping features
• Automated and Intelligent monitoring for Azure services, including App Service, AKS, etc.
• It allows automating CI/CD, which helps to speed up the DevOps pipeline

Verdict: The best part about Dynatrace is that it automates the most time-consuming tasks like error detection and root cause analysis. With this, you can troubleshoot the issue faster and ensure your Azure applications’ high performance and availability.

Pricing: Offers a 15-day free trial and has various pricing plans Full-stack monitoring, Infrastructure monitoring, Digital experience monitoring, etc.

Datadog

Datadog is known for its ability to provide better visibility into your Azure infrastructure. It not only gives an overview of the health of your environment but offers more profound insights into individual services like AKS, App Service, etc., where the tool currently supports integrating with more than 40 Azure services.

Features

• You can collect, search, and analyze traces across various distributed architectures
• It can monitor cloud instances, on-premise & hybrid environments
• Building real-time interactive dashboards are made super easy
• Receive alerts via your preferred notification channels when there is a performance issue
• Retain errors and high latency traces automatically for 15 days

Verdict: One good tool to achieve end-to-end application performance monitoring, which also offers advanced logging, service dependency visualizations, alerting, automated root cause analysis and more.

Pricing: Offers a 14-day free trial.

New Relic

New Relic helps to optimize the performance, understand the dependencies and bottlenecks of all your Azure applications. It even offers features to provide team collaboration, making it easy for DevOps teams to work together to help solve critical problems and ensure security.

Features

• Application Monitoring: Monitors the application performance trends like page loads times, error rates, slow transactions, etc
• Database Monitoring: Monitor the database performance to avoid errors
• Availability & Error Monitoring: Find & resolve issues before your customers note it
• Charts & Dashboards: Build personalized dashboards with a simple point-click and drag-drop interface to view crucial performance metrics.
• Alert Policies: It enables you to set the threshold values for your applications

Verdict: Itprovides a complete view of your applications irrespective of where it is running. New Relic’s other features like custom reporting and transaction monitoring are also impressive.

Pricing: Free trial is available

Site 24×7

It is a full-stack monitoring tool that currently extends its support to 100+ Azure resources. So Site 24×7 can be a perfect fit to monitor multiple resources from a single view to ensure high application performance.

Features

• Monitor multi-cloud (Azure, AWS, GCP) from one console
• Reduce manual interventions and automate actions like fault resolution
• Azure forecasting to avoid performance issues
• Use Guidance Report to optimize costs, increase the performance and reliability of your Azure services
• Get to detect and view any unusual spikes in the performance metrics with the AI-powered anomaly dashboards

Verdict: It is an all-in-one tool that helps to analyze the health of your entire Azure infrastructure by providing complete visibility.

Pricing: Offers a 30-day free trial

CloudMonix

It is a leading monitoring and automation solution built for resources running in Azure. CloudMonix comes with capabilities like self-repairing, historical & scheduled reporting, live monitoring dashboards to provide you with deep performance insights, and more.

Features

• The dashboard shows live graph metrics of each resource individually through which you can track and analyze the performance of various resources in one place
•  It has various types of dashboards – Performance, status, alert dashboard, etc.
• Automated recoveryfrom failuresby scripting common responses to production issues
• Automatically increase the size of Azure resources according to your needs
• The tool can be integrated with various 3rd party tools to increase efficiency across stacks like collaboration, data storing, etc.

Verdict: Leverage the tool to get out of the box, automating features that provide uninterrupted service for your customers.

Pricing: Offers a 14-day free trial. It has three pricing tiers – Starter, Professional and Ultimate.

Splunk

It is an advanced performance monitoring tool that captures and analyzes all the Azure application logs, metrics, and traces. Splunk also makes sure to provide real-time visibility across your cloud environment.

Feature

• Dynamic alerting enables to set of alerts based on static thresholds, sudden changes, or historical anomalies.
• Full-stack observability to provide deeper analytics
• Quickly correlate events in latency or errors with tag values
• Service Mapping provides out-of-the-box visibility into all service interactions, dependencies, and performance.

Verdict: As Splunk has AI-driven analytics, this can be good for critical troubleshooting issues and performing root cause analysis without manual intervention.

Pricing: Free trial is available

Nodinite

Nodinite is an all-in-one platform that can log, monitor and document your Azure integrations. It offers support for API Management, Logic Apps, Functions, Event Grid, Service Bus, Web Jobs, etc.

Features

• End-to-end logging and monitoring
• Documenting your workflows
• Remote Actions
• Auto healing
• Repair and Resubmit
• Role-based security

Verdict: It is a decent tool that helps understand your entire message flow and prevent business downtime. Also, with a single Nodinite license, you can monitor any number of Azure resources and environments.

Pricing: Free trial is available

Conclusion

I hope this gave you a detailed view of all the top Azure monitoring tools currently available in the market. And among those tools, Serverless360 can be the ultimate choice if you want to get complete support for managing and monitoring numerous Azure resources from a business perspective.