A look at Azure monitoring and troubleshooting

Even now, plenty of businesses are still making the shift to the cloud. Chief decision-makers are plagued by fears about availability, potential downtime and security.

Organizations adopting Microsoft Azure need to be able to confidently make the transition without interruptions, which requires building out a strategy for monitoring your Azure environment.

By providing organizations a unified platform for their logs and other telemetry, Sumo Logic enables you to centralize your data in one place to simplify and accelerate mean time to resolution for availability, performance and security incidents. We offer a variety of Azure applications that give you visibility into your full Azure stack without having to parse individual logs and write complex queries.

Our most recent enhancement includes a new integration with Azure Event Hubs that provides our customers a fully managed, scalable and low-latency approach to stream high-volume logs from Azure to Sumo Logic and alert on findings in near real time.

Below is a detailed look at why companies are partnering with Microsoft for a cloud or hybrid-cloud solution and how they can get robust Azure visibility by managing their data with the Sumo Logic platform.

What is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft leveraged its constantly expanding worldwide network of data centers to create Azure, a cloud platform for building, deploying, and managing services and applications, anywhere. Azure lets you add cloud capabilities to your existing network through its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model, or entrust Microsoft with all of your computing and network needs with infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Either option provides secure, reliable access to your cloud-hosted data—one built on Microsoft’s proven architecture.

Why are people trusting their workloads to Microsoft Azure?

With so many options, why are companies moving workloads to Microsoft Azure? Here are some of the reasons:

• Flexibility
  With Microsoft Azure you can spin up new services and geometrically scale your data storage capabilities on the fly.

• Applications
  Microsoft makes developing and testing mission-critical integrations a snap. Move an application from test to production mode easily across a globally distributed network.

• Disaster recovery
  Sometimes the unthinkable becomes the very immediate reality. Another advantage of Microsoft Azure is its high-speed and geographically decentralized infrastructure, which creates limitless options for disaster recovery plans.

The combination of Microsoft’s vast infrastructure, constant application and services development and powerful presence in the global IT marketplace has made Microsoft Azure solutions the choice of many of the world’s Fortune 500 companies. But the infinite scalability of Azure can make it just as right for smaller organizations, too.

Managing Microsoft Azure logs for more efficient troubleshooting

The key to ongoing operational and security visibility is managing critical logs from the application and underlying stack. Important Azure data to track include:

• Activity Logs — Activity Logs are subscription-level logs that provide insight into the operations performed on resources in your subscription, for example, creating a virtual machine or deleting a logic app.

• Resource/Diagnostics Logs — Diagnostics Logs are resource-level logs that provide insight into operations that were performed within a resource itself, for example, getting a secret from a Key Vault.

• Metrics — Metrics provide performance statistics for different resources and the operating system in a virtual machine.

Why organizations use Sumo Logic for Azure monitoring

Even with Azure’s native logging and monitoring functionality, the vast amount of data flowing to make your network and applications operate can be overwhelming. The volume, variety and velocity of cloud data should not be underestimated.

A recent UserEvidence survey found that before adopting Sumo Logic for their Azure monitoring needs, organizations usually suffered from tool sprawl and lacked a unified approach to monitoring and troubleshooting their Azure environment.

The AI-powered Sumo Logic platform can unify developer, operations and security teams with a single source of truth for your Azure data and alert you of anomalies and deviations from normal patterns of activity. With capabilities like LogReduce, LogCompare and Outlier Detection, you can filter out the noise for system troubleshooting and proactively respond to operational and security issues.

Integrations like Microsoft Azure Audit, Microsoft Azure Web Apps, Microsoft Windows Server Active Directory, Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) and the popular Windows Performance app make it easy to bring your data into Sumo Logic and unlock actionable dashboards and visualizations. In fact, a majority of users surveyed by UserEvidence said they chose Sumo Logic because of our strong out-of-the-box integrations for Azure.

Looking to gain better Azure visibility?

Are you looking to make a migration to Azure or looking to consolidate your logs onto one platform for observability and security use cases? Learn more about how Sumo Logic can provide robust monitoring for Azure.