Azure, the cloud computing service from Microsoft, can significantly enhance your organization’s productivity, collaboration, and ease of use.
However, just like any other tool, it has to be well-managed and monitored to ensure that it is up and running at all times in optimal health.
Here is our list of the Best Azure Monitoring Tools:
- SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability – FREE TRIAL This system will monitor on-site assets and cloud platforms, presenting them as a unified system. The tool provides maps of networks and application dependencies and it offers analysis utilities. Install it on Windows Server, AWS, and Azure. Get a 30-day free trial.
- ManageEngine ADAudit Plus – FREE TRIAL This package protects Active Directory on Windows Server, Azure, and AWS. It also performs file integrity monitoring and user behavior analysis. Runs on Windows Server, Azure, and AWS. Start a 30-day free trial.
- Site24x7 Infrastructure Monitoring – FREE TRIAL This tool helps you stay on top of the performance and issues and outages in your Azure monitoring system by giving you the metrics and insights you need to address problems proactively. Start a 30-day free trial.
- ManageEngine Applications Manager – FREE TRIAL This tool proactively monitors all your Azure resources and gives the information needed about their performance, so you can make the necessary tweaks to improve their productivity. Start a 30-day free trial.
- Paessler PRTG Azure Monitoring – FREE TRIAL This is a powerful tool that analyzes your Azure platform, identifies any anomalies, and makes appropriate recommendations, so you can fix them before it affects your security or reputation. Start a 30-day free trial.
- Datadog Integrates well with DevOps workflows and pipelines to give detailed insights into the performance of your Azure platform and the applications hosted on it. This helps to quickly and efficiently catch the threats to your organization.
- Serverless360 An Azure monitoring system that groups services into logical applications, creates a cross-platform dependency map, implements distributed tracing, and logs Azure resource usage. Implemented as a SaaS platform, a virtual machine, or an Azure service.
- OpsView Monitors your Azure environment and gives all the metrics you need to monitor the performance of your cloud applications.
- ScienceLogic Gives you a clear and concise view of your entire Azure infrastructure and its services and applications.
- Dynatrace A fully automated Azure monitoring tool that uses advanced AI capabilities to analyze your Azure environment and accordingly makes appropriate recommendations to improve its overall efficiency.
- AppDynamics A part of Cisco, comes with readily available tools for rapidly troubleshooting the bottlenecks in the Azure environment and optimizing the performance of applications that run on it.
- LogicMonitor Integrates well with the Azure platform to gather metrics for detailed analysis and insights.
There are tons of things that can go wrong with the Azure platform, with some of the common problems being:
- Security vulnerabilities
- Misconfiguration
- Shared model
- Encryption of data, and more.
You need the right Azure monitoring tools to ensure that the above possible Azure problems don’t impact your organization. But this is easier said than done given the vast number of Azure monitoring tools available today.
The Best Azure Monitoring Tools
To ease this process, let’s dive deep into the features and pricing of each of some of the best tools that can monitor the performance and availability of Azure.
1. SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability – FREE TRIAL
In a recent assessment, SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability and other SolarWinds products compared favorably to the monitoring tools of other major system providers. Get a copy of the 2022 GigaOm Radar for Cloud Observability Solutions Report at the SolarWinds website.
Key Features
The features of SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability are:
- Deployment options include Windows Server, Azure, and AWS
- Tracks activities on Azure plus other cloud platforms, such as Google Cloud Platform and AWS
- Integrates monitoring across platforms
- Discovers assets and draws up a map of their interconnections
- Identifies application dependencies
- Offers an analytical tool that matches the performance of stack layers contributing to an application delivery
- A service that shows the path between endpoints
- Identification of the applications that link different assets together
- AI-based activity performance thresholds
- Correlation of activity between different services
- Identification of the root cause of performance problems
- A view of all users and the performance that they are experiencing
- Live performance tracking and analysis tools based on historical data
- Alerts for evolving performance issues
- Two plan levels with stack correlation and route visibility in the higher edition
- Matching Azure service activity to user experience
- Discovery and mapping for VMs and containers
- Monitors Azure App Service, Azure Event Hubs, Azure SQL Database
- Track Azure resources, such as CPU, memory, and access requests
Essentials – from $5 per node per month, Advanced – from $9 per node per month. Get a 30-day free trial.
2. ManageEngine ADAudit Plus – FREE TRIAL
ManageEngine ADAudit Plus operates on Active Directory instances on all platforms, including Azure. The tool protects AD against unauthorized changes and tracks the activities of users, identifying file access per user account as listed in Active Directory.
Key Features
Here are some of the important features of ManageEngine ADAudit Plus:
- Monitors user activities on workstations
- Tracks file access activities on servers, including file servers and cloud accounts
- Logs file access on Azure and AWS accounts
- Free edition for activity monitoring on up to 25 workstations
- Compliance auditing for SOX, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, FISMA, and GLBA
The cost is:
- Free: $0
- Standard: From $595
- Professional: From $945
Get a 30-day free trial.
3. Site24x7 Infrastructure Monitoring – FREE TRIAL
Site24x7 Infrastructure Monitoring can give all the insights you need to stay on top of the entire cloud infrastructure. It also makes it easy to manage your cloud deployments while its AI-driven predictions ensure that you handle issues before they become problems.
Key Features
The features of Site24X7 Infrastructure Monitoring are:
- Monitors private, public, and hybrid cloud environments
- Provides a centralized approach to manage all your cloud resources
- Analyzes the performance trends of native cloud services
- Uncovers malicious activities at the earliest
- Comes with AI-powered reporting
- Optimizes the entire cloud infrastructure with built-in best practices
- Automates incident remediation for individual resources
- Tracks the performance of virtual machines and Kubernetes
- Stays on top of PaaS such as SQL database, App Service, Event Hubs, and more
- Its VM extensions provide system-level metrics such as CPU, memory, and network usage for all Windows and Linux virtual machines.
- Gives insights into the application performance metrics of .NET applications
- Collects logs from cloud-based applications and analyzes them with its log management tool to provide in-depth insights
- Comes with 100+ plugin extensions
The starter pack is priced at $9/month/resource. The cost will increase as you add more services and resources. Start a 30-day free trial.
4. ManageEngine Applications Manager – FREE TRIAL
ManageEngine Applications Manager is an out-of-the-box monitoring solution for your Azure platform. It proactively monitors the KPIs of your Azure environment and aggregates the metrics to give you a comprehensive idea of your platform’s performance.
Key Features
The features of ManageEngine Applications Manager are as follows:
- Provides rich and actionable insights into your Azure environment
- The root cause analyzer helps to resolve issues faster and more efficiently by pinpointing the accurate cause of different problems
- Responds to critical events by sending alerts as a text message or email, depending on your configuration
- It makes it easy to auto-scale your cloud resources based on the system load
- Identifies the idle resources so that you can save on costs
- Integrates well with ITSM tools such as ServiceNow for a more streamlined approach to resolving errors
- You have the option to configure the baselines for acceptable performance
- Points out improper resource allocations
- Prevents downtime and increased latency
- Sends detailed information about threats and vulnerabilities
- Ensures the continuous availability of your Azure databases
- Provides deep visibility into your storage accounts
Click here to download a free trial version.
5. Paessler PRTG Azure Monitoring – FREE TRIAL
PRTG from Paessler is a sensor-based monitoring tool that monitors every aspect of your Azure platform and applications to give you powerful insights into their working and health, so you take the necessary steps proactively to get the most out of them.
Key Features
Here’s a look at the features of PRTG related to Azure monitoring:
- Requires minimal setup and configuration, and this saves time and effort.
- The existing PRG sensors can be customized to create sensors to monitor specific aspects of the Azure platform.
- Makes it easy to keep track of resources and their usage
- Automatically detects new resources in the Azure environment
- Monitors 17 types of resources, including SQL databases, websites, storage accounts, cloud apps, schedulers, service health, virtual machines, and more.
- Gives information on specific metrics such as CPU percentage, database size, used capacity, latency, availability, disk read/write operations, downtimes, etc.
- The billing sensor monitors your billings and ensures that you stay within your budget.
- Minimal maintenance required
- Allows you to set custom error limits
- Generates reports that give insights into the performance of your different resources on the Azure platform.
Since this is a sensor-based system, the cost depends on the number of sensors you use. Typically, you use one sensor to monitor a single aspect of a resource. For example, you need a sensor to monitor the database size of your SQL database and another sensor to know its CPU usage, and so on.
The cost is:
- Up to 500 sensors – $1,750
- 501-1000 sensors – $3,200
- 1001-2500 sensors – $6,500
- 2501-5000 sensors – $11,500
- Unlimited sensors for one installation – $15,500
- Unlimited sensors for unlimited sensors – Custom
You can access a 30-day free trial to work out your network requirements.
6. Datadog Azure Monitoring
Datadog has advanced Azure monitoring capabilities to collect different metrics from your cloud resources and analyze them for advanced insights into the health and performance of your applications.
Key Features
The salient features of Datadog’s Azure monitoring capabilities are:
- No agent installation is required
- Gathers metrics from Azure VMs, including device-specific information such as location
- Collects information from every sub-integration as well
- It’s easy to integrate Datadog with your Azure
- The metrics are analyzed to provide detailed insights that come in handy to make crucial decisions and know your applications’ health and performance.
- Provides automated scripts
- Maps the legacy and cloud-based systems to provide a unified experience
- Streamlines single sign-on from your Azure portal
- Works well with DevOps workflows and pipelines
Datadog offers three comprehensive plans.
- Free – $0 – Supports up to five hosts and retains metrics for just a day
- Pro – $15/host/month – Supports 600+ integrations and retains metrics for 15 months
- Enterprise – $23/host/month – Provides machine learning-based alerts and advanced controls
Click here for a free trial.
7. Serverless360
Serverless360 offers three Azure monitoring services. These are a logical application creator that groups together and monitors Azure services; a distributed tracing system; and a resource usage tracker. These services are available individually or as a group. The application manager creates an application dependency map that links the newly created logical Azure-based applications with other services and infrastructure, no matter where they are hosted.
The tool provides an application dependency map and distributed tracing that tracks the activities of each business process end-to-end.
Key Features
- The important features of the Serverless360 platform are:
- The option to use the pans on a SaaS platform, as a virtual appliance, or as an Azure services
- The creation of logical applications, based on separate Azure services
- Application dependency mapping that links the logical applications to the systems that support them and the applications that they serve
- Translation of performance reports from siloed Azure services into activity feedback for logical applications
- A threshold creation utility for metrics tracked on Azure-based logical applications
- Alerts that trigger when performance thresholds are crossed
- Alert forwarding as notifications through Slack, Webhook, PagerDuty, and Microsoft Teams
- Root cause analysis
- Automated remediation action for performance problems
- The option to construct remediation scripts and specify triggers to launch them
- Traces business process activity ens-to-end as it passes through the application dependency map
- Uses distributed tracing to generate activity logs
- Records the utilization of each Azure service
- Provides Azure activity reporting
- Enables Azure bill-checking
- Offered as individual units or as a package of two or three services
- The offer of a guided demo of the system
- A free trial of the SaaS platform
Serverless360 doesn’t publish a price list. You can register for the free demo and request a quote.
Click here to get a free trial of the Serverless360 SaaS platform.
8. OpsView
OpsView gives clear visibility into your Azure services so that you can use them well for your business requirements. It consolidates all notifications and metrics in a single place and sends notifications if any values fall below the established threshold levels.
Key Features
The features of OpsView are:
- Provides a configuration wizard to set it up in your system quickly
- Easily identifies hosts on your Azure environment
- Monitors all the metrics you need to use Azure efficiently.
- Stays on top of the health and performance of the Elastic database features of Azure
- Comes with seven service checks for Azure virtual machines
- Has a host of tools for monitoring different Azure tools.
- Integrates with third-party alerting and integration tools
OpsView offers two plans, and they are OpsView Cloud and Enterprise. The first plan is ideal for companies that want to monitor 150 to 50,000 hosts, while the second plan is more suited for large enterprises that want to host more than 50,000 resources.
Click here to schedule a demo.
9. ScienceLogic
ScienceLogic’s Azure monitoring tools analyze the performance and well-being of your Azure platform and all the services and applications that run on it. It identifies dependencies and gives you the appropriate insights to boost its performance.
Key Features
Here’s a look at ScienceLogic’s Azure monitoring capabilities:
- Detects and diagnoses issues across the entire cloud infrastructure
- Maps the dependencies for quick reference
- Segments analytics into different criteria such as geography, technology, business, and more for a more refined and streamlined understanding
- Deep dives into log monitoring to help with troubleshooting
- Identifies resources that have been idle for a long time
- Diagnoses potential problems before end-users identify them
- Sends alerts to bring your attention to critical issues.
- Optimizes the performance of your applications
- Helps you to strategize the best way to get maximum value from your Azure platform
Contact the sales team for a custom quote. Click here to request a demo.
10. Dynatrace
Dynatrace comprehensively monitors the health of your entire Azure infrastructure and makes appropriate recommendations to improve its efficiency and performance.
Key Features
Below are the features of Dynatrace:
- Comes with automatic and intelligent observability to identify problems as soon as they crop up. You can address them at the earliest to ensure that there are no disruptions to the end-users.
- Supports more than 500 technologies
- Provides the broadest multi-cloud and technology support
- Automatically discovers dependencies and maps them in context
- Provides visibility into the health and performance of hosts, containers, traces, and logs.
- Has out-of-the-box support for cloud-native architectures
- Intelligently monitors all the services running on Azure Cloud
- Solves Azure issues faster
- Automatically captures transactions across every tier
- Its AI capabilities adapt as the environment changes
- Automates CI/CD to speed up pipeline
- Shortens innovation cycles
- Accelerates Azure cloud migrations
Dynatrace offers six plans, and they are:
- Full-stack monitoring- $69 a month for an 8GB host
- Infrastructure monitoring – $21/month for an 8Gb host
- Digital Experience Monitoring – $11/month for 10k digital experience monitoring units
- Application security – $10/month for an 8GB host
- Open ingestion – $25k/month for 100k Davis Data Units
- Cloud Automation – Contact the sales team
Click here for a free trial.
11. AppDynamics
AppDynamics offers advanced Azure monitoring tools that provide observability into the entire Azure landscape. It troubleshoots performance issues and optimizes all the applications that run on it.
Key Features
Here’s a look at the features offered by AppDynamics:
- Monitors fast-growing applications at scale
- Gives complete visibility into applications built on .NET, .NET Core, Azure services, and serverless functions.
- Automatically discovers applications and their dependencies
- Baselines the performance of different cloud applications
- Visualizes real-time interactions of every dependency
- Paves the way for an efficient and streamlined Azure migration and ensures that it doesn’t impact the end-users
- Leverages serverless APM for Azure functions
- Instruments code right out of the box
AppDynamics offers four pricing plans, and they are as follows:
- Infrastructure Monitoring Edition – $6 per month per CPU core
- Premium Edition – $60 per month per CPU core
- Enterprise Edition – $90 per month per CPU core
- Accurate User Monitoring – $0.06 per month per 1000 tokens
Click here for a free trial.
12. LogicMonitor
LogicMonitor is a comprehensive tool that can prevent outages and optimize your IT resources for gleaning better value from them. It integrates with 2000 services, including Azure, to gather metrics and analyze them for in-depth analytics.
Key Features
The salient features of LogicMonitor related to Azure monitoring are:
- The Azure monitoring module can be used out-of-the-box with little to no additional effort or configurations
- Monitors Azure-hosted infrastructure’s performance metrics
- Builds dashboards to display the data that’s most critical for your organization
- Simplifies cloud monitoring with its easy-to-use interface and extensive functionality
- Delivers complete visibility into the health and performance of Azure applications
- Uses Resource Performance monitoring, Azure monitoring, and ROI monitoring modules to provide end-to-end visibility
- Streamlines migrations and makes them more manageable and predictable
- Gives instant visibility into your deployments
- Ensures compliance with the existing monitoring standards
LogicMonitor offers two plans, namely,
- Pro – Up to 199 devices
- Enterprise – 200+ devices
Click here to get a quote for each. Click here to try it for free.
Conclusion
To conclude, Azure monitoring tools come with advanced capabilities to provide all the insights you need about the performance of your Azure environment, using which you can make better decisions, optimize the working, reduce costs, and more.
The tools mentioned above are some of the best in this space, and we hope the detailed explanation of its features was useful in helping you decide the right one for your organization.
