End-to-End Observability in Your Cloud and Hybrid Environments

Observability is a crucial aspect of managing cloud-based applications as it enables organizations to gain insights into their systems and troubleshoot issues quickly and efficiently.

Observability pertains to the capacity to comprehend the occurrences or events taking place within your environment by proactively collecting, visualizing, and analyzing all the data it produces. And to achieve observability, a monitoring tool must collect and analyze different kinds of data, known as the pillars of observability. These pillars are typically metrics, logs, and distributed traces.

When an environment is observable, it means that users can quickly identify the root cause of any performance problems by analyzing the data it produces.

When organizations move their workloads to the cloud, it’s crucial to create a monitoring strategy that involves input from developers, operations staff, and infrastructure engineers...

Understanding the importance of a monitoring strategy

SpringToys is a multi-cloud organization with a distributed and dispersed IT environment. They lack a consistent architectural pattern, which has led to them having various solutions in place, making it challenging to manage security configurations across all environments. Additionally, platform security and configuration management have never been a top priority for the organization, resulting in several environments being built manually by different individuals with different security standards.

SpringToys has multiple Azure subscriptions, and their on-premises data centers run a variety of virtualization platforms managed by different teams with varying security standards. They use an unknown number of Linux distributions and Windows servers with a disjointed, often ad hoc patch management strategy. Furthermore, SpringToys runs container-based solutions both on-premises and in Azure.

To address these challenges, SpringToys...

Working on an effective monitoring strategy

A monitoring strategy should make the organization agile and proactive in monitoring complex distributed applications essential to the business. It should help the organization quickly detect and address any business issues. By regularly monitoring the system, the organization can ensure that the cloud environment is performing as expected and meeting the business’s needs.

An effective monitoring strategy will help the organization save money by reducing the cost of downtime, reducing the time it takes to identify and fix problems, and optimizing resources. This strategy will also help improve customer satisfaction by ensuring that the systems are working properly and that the organization is responsive to any issues.

To start designing a monitoring strategy, you can leverage the Cloud Adoption Framework, which recommends including monitoring in any cloud migration project’s strategy and planning phases. A sound monitoring...

Azure Monitor – a comprehensive solution for observability and efficiency

Azure Monitor helps you keep track of what’s happening in your environment, whether they’re in the cloud or on your servers. It can collect data from all parts of your services and resources and put it in one place so that you can analyze it easily. This helps you ensure your applications and services are running smoothly and quickly find and fix any problems.

By collecting data from various pillars and consolidating information from all monitored resources, Azure Monitor can help you accomplish an end-to-end observability strategy.

By providing a common set of tools to correlate and analyze data from multiple Azure subscriptions and tenants, Azure Monitor makes it easier to achieve observability across different services.

With Azure Monitor, all your environment data can be stored together and analyzed using common tools. This means you can easily see how different parts of your...

Summary

This chapter reviewed the importance of having an effective strategy to monitor your resources across multiple environments, including Azure, on-premises, and other cloud providers, from a single, unified platform. This allows you to gain visibility into the entire application stack, from the user experience to the underlying infrastructure, and identify issues before they impact your business.

One of the main benefits of using Azure Monitor is that it provides a single source of truth for all your monitoring data, including logs, metrics, and traces. This allows you to correlate data across different sources and gain a holistic view of your environment. With Azure Monitor, you can quickly identify issues, troubleshoot problems, and optimize your resources for better performance and cost savings. Additionally, Azure Monitor provides advanced analytics capabilities that help you proactively detect and remediate issues before they affect your users. By enabling end-to-end...