Azure Monitor Workspace: A Comprehensive Guide

Azure Monitor Workspace is a powerful tool for monitoring and managing your Azure resources. It provides a unified view of all your resources, making it easier to troubleshoot issues and optimize performance.

Azure Monitor Workspace is integrated with Azure Log Analytics, which allows you to collect and analyze log data from your resources. This data can be used to identify trends and patterns, and to create custom dashboards and alerts.

With Azure Monitor Workspace, you can monitor and analyze data from a wide range of Azure services, including Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Storage, and Azure Networking. This provides a comprehensive view of your resources and helps you to identify potential issues before they become major problems.

Azure Monitor Workspace is also highly scalable, making it suitable for large-scale Azure deployments. It can handle large amounts of data and scale up or down as needed, ensuring that your resources are always monitored and analyzed efficiently.

Azure Monitor is a powerful reporting and analytics tool that helps you understand how your applications are performing and proactively identifies issues affecting them and the resources they depend on.

It collects, analyzes, and acts on telemetry from your cloud and on-premises environments, delivering a comprehensive solution for maximizing availability and performance.

Azure Monitor is used for insights into the behavior and running of your environment and applications, allowing you to respond proactively to faults in your system.

The tool is a key component of the Azure Monitor workspace, which is responsible for data ingestion from various Azure services like Azure Monitor, Microsoft Sentinel, and Microsoft Defender for cloud.

These services use log analytics workspaces for data ingestion, where logs from various sources are collected and analyzed.

Here are some common log formats that require dedicated tables in a log analytics workspace:

Analysis takes place at the Log Analytics workspace level, while visualization is done through insights and dashboards, and monitoring is done using alerts and SIEM/SOAR tools.

Creating an Azure Monitor workspace is a straightforward process, and you can start with a single workspace to reduce complexity. Azure Monitor workspaces are regional, so you'll need to choose a region when creating a new workspace.

You should consider the default Azure Monitor workspace limit, which is 1 million active times series and 1 million events per minute ingested. If you're expecting a large volume of data, you may need to split your workspace into multiple workspaces later on.

Here are some scenarios where you might need to split your Azure Monitor workspace: Monitoring data in sovereign cloudsCompliance or regulatory requirements that mandate storage of data in specific regionsSeparating metrics in test, pre-production, and production environments

Azure Monitor workspaces are regional, so you'll need to choose a location when you create one.

This is important because it determines where your data will be stored.

To keep things simple, start with a single workspace. This will make it easier to manage and query data from your Azure resources.

You can have multiple services sending data to the same workspace at the same time, but there's a limit on how much it can scale.

The default limit for an Azure Monitor workspace is 1 million active times series and 1 million events per minute ingested.

Here are the key considerations to keep in mind when creating a workspace:

As your product grows, you may need to increase the metrics in your Azure Monitor workspace. You can request an increase to 50 million events or active time series.

Azure Monitor workspaces have default quotas and limitations for metrics, but you can request an increase to accommodate your growing product.

If your capacity needs to be exceptionally large, consider creating multiple Azure Monitor workspaces to meet your data ingestion needs.

Creating multiple workspaces can be beneficial in certain situations. You can split an Azure Monitor workspace into multiple workspaces when it reaches 80% of its maximum capacity or is forecasted to reach that volume.

For example, you might need to create an Azure Monitor workspace in each sovereign cloud for monitoring data. Compliance or regulatory requirements can also mandate storage of data in specific regions, prompting the creation of an Azure Monitor workspace per region.

Splitting workspaces can be necessary for separating metrics in test, pre-production, and production environments. This can be achieved by creating an Azure Monitor workspace per environment.

A single query cannot access multiple Azure Monitor workspaces, so keep data that you want to retrieve in a single query in the same workspace. For visualization purposes, setting up Grafana with each workspace as a dedicated data source will allow for querying multiple workspaces in a single Grafana panel.

Here's a summary of when to create multiple workspaces:

An Azure Monitor workspace is a unique environment for data collected by Azure Monitor, with its own data repository, configuration, and permissions.

Each Azure Monitor workspace has its own data repository, which stores data according to its data retention period, currently set at 18 months.

You can't use quota limits, like the Daily Cap or Data retention limits found in a Log Analytics Workspace, in an Azure Monitor workspace.

Only Prometheus metrics are currently hosted by an Azure Monitor workspace, but it will eventually contain all metrics collected by Azure Monitor, including native metrics.

You can manage your Azure subscription using a graphical user interface with the Azure portal.

The Azure portal is a web-based, unified console that provides an alternative to command-line tools.

You can build, manage, and monitor everything from simple web apps to complex cloud deployments in the portal.

The Monitor section of the Azure portal provides a visual interface that gives you access to the data collected for Azure resources and an easy way to access the tools, insights, and visualizations in Azure Monitor.

When designing an Azure Monitor workspace architecture, it's essential to consider the criteria that will help you decide on the right setup for your organization.

You should aim to use the lowest number of workspaces that will match your requirements, while optimizing for minimal administrative management overhead.

Here are some key design criteria to consider:

Azure Monitor receives data from target resources like applications, operating systems, Azure resources, Azure subscriptions, and Azure tenants.

The nature of the resource defines which data types are available, with metric-based data types focusing on numerical time-sensitive values and log-based data types focusing on querying content data held in structured log files.

Azure Monitor processes data to perform functions such as analysis, visualization, alerting, automation, and integrations.

Azure Monitor categorizes data types into three main types: metrics, logs, and both metrics and logs.

Here are the key differences between metric-based and log-based data types:

Azure Diagnostics offers capabilities to export data to other resources for custom monitoring and manipulation, allowing diagnostic logs to be passed to resources like Azure Storage, Log Analytics workspace, and Event hubs for further processing.

When designing an Azure Monitor workspace architecture, it's essential to consider the number of workspaces you need to meet your requirements. The lowest number of workspaces that will match your needs should be used, while also optimizing for minimal administrative management overhead.

You can create separate Azure Monitor workspaces for operational data based on logical boundaries, such as by a role, application type, or type of metric. This is known as segregating by logical boundaries.

For multiple Azure tenants, create an Azure Monitor workspace in each tenant. Data sources can only send monitoring data to an Azure Monitor workspace in the same Azure tenant.

Each Azure Monitor workspace resides in a particular Azure region. Regulatory or compliance requirements might dictate the storage of data in particular locations.

You can also create separate Azure Monitor workspaces to define data ownership, such as by subsidiaries or affiliated companies.

Here are the key criteria to consider when designing an Azure Monitor workspace architecture:

By considering these criteria, you can design an Azure Monitor workspace architecture that meets your needs and minimizes administrative management overhead.

Log Analytics and Alerts are crucial components of Azure Monitor Workspace, allowing you to collect, store, and analyze log data from various sources.

Azure Log Analytics Workspace is the logical storage unit where log data is collected and stored, facilitating an assured monitoring service to fulfill the monitoring needs of the user.

You can collect data from various sources such as Azure Virtual Machines, Windows or Linux Virtual Machines, and Azure Resources in a subscription.

Log Analytics workspaces are based on Azure Data Explorer, using a powerful analysis engine and the rich Kusto query language (KQL).

Here are the three types of Azure Alerts available:

You can use these alerts to notify you when specific events happen on your Azure resources, such as creating a new VM in a subscription.

Azure Monitor Workspace provides integration capabilities with various Azure services, allowing you to build custom solutions that use your monitoring data. You can use Azure services like Event Hubs, Azure Storage, and APIs to read and write metrics and logs to and from Azure Monitor.

Azure Monitor has partnered with several external companies, including Elastic, Datadog, and Logz.io, to provide an Azure-hosted version of their products, making interoperability easier. You can also use Azure Logic Apps and Azure Functions to automate tasks and perform complex actions in response to Azure Monitor alerts.

Azure Monitor integrates with other Azure services, such as Azure DevOps and GitHub, allowing you to create Work Item Integration with monitoring data and perform release annotations and continuous monitoring. You can also use Azure Monitor with Defender for the Cloud, Microsoft Sentinel, and Microsoft Intune to collect and analyze security events and perform threat analysis.

Azure Monitor's data platform is a powerful tool that stores data in four separate stores: metrics, logs, distributed traces, and changes. Each store is optimized for specific types of data and monitoring scenarios.

Azure Monitor Metrics is a time-series database that collects metrics at regular intervals, identified with a timestamp, a name, a value, and one or more defining labels. It supports native Azure Monitor metrics and Prometheus metrics.

Logs are recorded system events that can contain different types of data, be structured or free-form text, and contain a timestamp. Azure Monitor stores structured and unstructured log data of all types in Azure Monitor Logs.

Distributed tracing is a technique used to trace requests as they travel through a distributed system, allowing you to see the path of a request as it travels through different services and components. It helps you to identify performance bottlenecks and troubleshoot issues in a distributed system.

Azure Monitor gets distributed trace data from instrumented applications and stores it in a separate workspace in Azure Monitor Logs. Change Analysis (classic) helps you understand which changes, such as deploying updated code, may have caused issues in your systems.

For long-term archival of monitoring data for auditing or compliance purposes, you can export to Azure Storage. SCOM MI stores its information in an SQL Database, but uses SQL Managed Instance because it's in Azure.

Azure Monitor offers a seamless experience on top of multi-source data, giving you in-depth views into all your tracked resources and even data from other services. The three foundations of observability are metrics, logs, and distributed traces.

Here are some of the larger insights available in Azure Monitor:

Application Insights is a powerful tool that helps you monitor the availability, performance, and usage of your web applications. It's a key component of Azure Monitor, which provides end-to-end monitoring of your applications and their components.

Application Insights collects data from your applications and provides insights into how they're performing. This includes anomaly detection, which helps you identify and fix issues before they become major problems.

One of the benefits of Application Insights is that it's easy to set up and use. You can start collecting data and gaining insights quickly, without requiring a lot of configuration.

Here are some key features of Application Insights:

By using Application Insights, you can gain a deeper understanding of how your applications are performing and make data-driven decisions to improve them. It's a valuable tool for any developer or IT professional working with web applications.

Integrate Azure Monitor with other systems or build custom solutions using your monitoring data. You can use Azure services like Event Hubs to stream Azure Monitor data to partner SIEM and monitoring tools.

Azure Monitor can also be integrated with Azure Storage to export data for less expensive, long-term archival of monitoring data. This is useful for auditing or compliance purposes.

Many external partners integrate with Azure Monitor, including Elastic, Datadog, Logz.io, and Dynatrace. These partners provide an Azure-hosted version of their products to make interoperability easier.

You can use APIs to read and write metrics and logs to and from Azure Monitor. This gives you unlimited possibilities to build custom solutions that integrate with Azure Monitor.

Azure Logic Apps can be used to automate tasks and business processes by using workflows that integrate with different systems and services. Activities are available that read and write metrics and logs in Azure Monitor.

Here are some additional integrations that may be of interest:

These integrations can help you customize responses and perform other actions in response to Azure Monitor alerts.