Module 3f - Describe Core Solution and Mgmt Tools - Choosing the Best Monitoring Services

Question 1

Hint: O D AP

What can monitoring solutions help you with in Azure?

Answer 1

• *Optimization** - Answers/Insights/Alerts to optimize your cloud usage
• *Diagnostics** - Root cause analysis for unplanned issues
• *Availability Planning** - Proactive preparation for planned outage and downtime

Question 2

What is Azure ADVISOR?

Answer 2

Its your cloud optimization tool.

It evaluates your existing use of Azure Resources in order to provide recommendations to improve reliability, security, performance, reduce costs and overall achieve operational excellence.

• Saves you time with optimization tasks
• Recommendations include suggested action items that can be either done right away, postponed or dismissed
• Recommendations are given via Azure Portal, API
• Notification support for Alerts for new Recommendations

Question 3

Hint: R S P C OE!

What are the five (5) Recommendation Categories for Azure Advisor?

Answer 3

• Reliability - Ensure/Improve continuity of business-critical applications
• Security - Detect threats, vulnerabilities, anything that could lead to a security breach
• Performance - Improve the speed of your apps
• Cost - Optimize and reduce your Azure spend
• Operational Excellence - Achieve process and workflow efficiency, resource manageability and deployment best practices

Question 4

Hint: T

What is Azure MONITOR?

Azure Monitor only collects telemetry for Cloud Resources (T/F)?

Answer 4

Azure Monitor is a monitoring solution that collects TELEMETRY.

It’s a platform for collecting, analyzing, visualizing, and potential action-taking, based on METRICS and logging data from your entire Azure and On-Prem environments

Question 5

(Hint: five (5) sources…

What sources does Azure Monitor collect data from?

Answer 5

• Application Layer
• OS Layer
• Azure Resources
• Azure Subscription
• Azure Tenant (then potentially “Custom Resources”)

Question 6

Where does Azure Monitor store collected data?

Answer 6

Centralized repositories. Workflows and logging data are stored here

Question 7

Hint: P A R

Give three (3) major ways that data collected by Azure Monitor is used.

Answer 7

Performance Monitoring: Real-time and historical performance across the entire architecture

Alerting: Real-time alerting (SMS, email, etc). Additional options with thresholds to trigger auto-scaling

Mostly though for Reporting:

• High-level reports in Azure Monitor Dashboard
• Aggregated and detailed reporting
• Granular reporting via custom views using PowerBI or Kusto queries

Question 8

What is Azure Service Health?

Answer 8

A personalized view of the overall health of services, regions and resource you use.

Question 9

What are Root Cause Analyses (RCAs)?

Answer 9

After an outage, Azure Service Health provides official incident reports

Question 10

Hint: SI PM HA

What are the three (3) Event types Service Health keeps an eye on?

Answer 10

Service Issues:

• Outages that affect you right now. Drill down into services/regions/updates from dev teams, and share/track info on each

Planned Maintenance:

• Events that affect availability. Drill down into affected services, regions and details; this will show you what you need to do
• MOST events occur without impact to you and are NOT shown
• Reboot events allow you to choose when to perform maintenance to minimize downtime

Health Advisories:

• Issues that require immediate action to avoid service disruptions (breaking changes, service retirement, etc.)
• Announced FAR in advance to allow for planning

Question 11

What does status.azure.com show you?

Answer 11

Issues that broadly affect Azure customers. Gives you status of all services that run on Azure, for each possible Azure Geographie, including Government, China and Jio (Azure India)

Question 12

When you need to analyze for cost reduction, improve resilience and harden security, which Azure Monitoring Service do you use?

Answer 12

Azure Advisor when you’re looking for analysis on DEPLOYED Resources. You’ll get SUGGESTIONS for reliability, security, performance, cost and operations

Question 13

When need to monitor your Services or your usage of Azure, which two Azure Monitoring Services do you use?

Answer 13

Azure Service Health to keep tabs on your individual usage of Azure, Regions you’re in, and availability status of Services

Azure Monitor to create reports and notifications on performance

Question 14

When you want to measure custom Event Logs, which Azure Monitoring Service do you use?

Answer 14

Azure Monitor for measuring custom events and other telemetry data

NOTE - Azure Application Insights uses Azure Monitor under the hood. So custom logs and code and such, it still falls back to Azure Monitor!

Question 15

When you want to set up alerts for outages or auto-scaling/auto-deployment of additional instances/Resources, which Azure Monitoring Service do you use?

Answer 15

Azure Monitor again!

Question 16

Use Case: You want to optimize your cloud spend, get an overview on potential security breaches to protect customer and other private data, as well as garner a better understanding of best practices for cloud implementations and optimizations. You want “easy wins”

What service would you use?

Answer 16

Azure Advisor. It was made for this exact scenario; best practices recommendations based on industry standards to gain higher levels of operational excellence.

Why not Azure Monitor? Because we’re not analyzing telemetry nor are we reviewing event logs and such.

Why not Azure Health? Because we’re not addressing availability or outage issues on a broad scale

Question 17

Use Case: We are getting intermittent errors in the system and are not sure where they are coming from nor the cause. We want to analyze the apps various services to determine cause and source, timing, etc.

What service would you use?

Answer 17

Azure App Insights, which is the heart of Azure Monitor. We can gain deep telemetry from the entire system, and send alerts when specific user sessions trigger the error, giving us timing and specific scenario data for replication (i.e. use Monitor to set up alerting and auto-scaling when it affects your specific resource)

Note - It gets expensive! 😂

Why not Azure Health? Because we’re not addressing availability or outage issues on a broad scale.

Why not Azure Advisor? Because we’re not looking for recommendations on operational excellence or industry standard practices.

Question 18

Use Case: You want to operationalize your cloud environment:

• Letting stakeholders know about upcoming planned downtime in advance
• Warn solution architects about Microsoft plans to sunset services, allowing time and opportunity for rearchitecture
• Discover whether or not broad service interruptions will affect your customers
• Provide stakeholders reporting on incident occurrences and reasons

What service would you use?

Answer 18

Azure Health (obviously). You’d set up alerts for when a broad outage affects all Azure Customers

Why not Advisor? Because we’re not optimizing
Why not Monitor? Because we’re not tracking telemetry