Azure Network Monitoring Essentials for IT Professionals

As an IT professional, you know how crucial it is to have a solid grasp of Azure network monitoring. Azure Network Monitoring Essentials is a fundamental component of this, providing a centralized platform for monitoring and managing your network performance.

Azure Network Monitoring Essentials is built on the Azure Monitor platform, which collects and analyzes data from various sources, including Azure resources, on-premises infrastructure, and third-party services.

With Azure Network Monitoring Essentials, you can gain real-time visibility into your network performance, identify potential issues before they impact users, and troubleshoot problems more efficiently. This can be a game-changer for IT teams, especially those with limited resources.

Azure Network Monitoring Features provide a comprehensive suite of tools to help you monitor, diagnose, and visualize your network environment. This includes features like Connection Monitor, which offers unified, end-to-end connection monitoring to ensure optimal network performance.

Connection Monitor provides detailed insights into reachability, latency, and topology changes of network connections, making it easier to identify and troubleshoot issues. It's essential for maintaining reliable network operations, whether you're monitoring connectivity between Azure VMs, on-premises machines, or external URLs.

Network Watcher features include Flow logs, which help you build a deeper insight into your network traffic patterns. This tool also provides data for monitoring, auditing, and compliance with network profiles.

Here are some key features of Network Watcher:

Azure Network Watcher also allows you to generate a visual representation of your network topology, making it easier for new administrators to comprehend the virtual network structure and troubleshoot any issues.

The Diagnostic Toolkit is a game-changer for network monitoring. It provides access to all the diagnostic features available for troubleshooting the network.

You can use this drop-down list to access features like packet capture, VPN troubleshoot, connection troubleshoot, next hop, and IP flow verify. Each of these features offers a unique set of tools to help you identify and resolve network issues.

The Diagnostic Toolkit is a one-stop-shop for all your network diagnostic needs. It's a must-have for anyone responsible for maintaining optimal network health and security.

With the Diagnostic Toolkit, you can easily access features like Connection Monitor, which provides unified, end-to-end connection monitoring, and NSG Diagnostics, which leverages flow logs to provide detailed insights into IP traffic passing through an NSG.

By using the Diagnostic Toolkit, you can quickly and easily identify and resolve network issues, ensuring that your network is always running smoothly and securely.

The Topology tool within Azure Network Watcher provides a visual representation of your network resources and their interconnections, making it easier to identify potential issues or optimize network configurations.

This tool is invaluable for inventory management and network monitoring, offering a comprehensive view of resources across subscriptions, regions, and locations.

You can use Topology to understand the network structure and simplify the process of identifying potential issues or optimizing network configurations.

Azure's Connection Monitor offers unified, end-to-end connection monitoring, essential for maintaining optimal network performance.

It provides detailed insights into the reachability, latency, and topology changes of network connections, making it easier to diagnose and resolve network issues.

Connection Monitor helps ensure reliable network operations by providing a comprehensive view of network health and facilitating the resolution of complex network problems.

The Connection Troubleshoot tool tests direct TCP or ICMP connections from specific Azure resources to other network endpoints, making it indispensable for diagnosing network connectivity and performance issues.

This tool offers a comprehensive view of network health and facilitates the resolution of complex network problems.

Azure's Topology provides a visualization of Azure virtual networks and connected resources, allowing you to understand network topology and relationships between resources.

You can drill down to the resource view of an individual resource to see its traffic and connectivity insights and access network diagnostic tools to troubleshoot any network issues the resource is experiencing.

The Connectivity tab provides an easy way to visualize all tests configured via Connection monitor and Connection monitor (classic) for the selected set of subscriptions.

Tests are grouped by Sources and Destinations tiles and display the reachability status for each test, making it easier to identify potential issues or optimize network configurations.

You can select any item in the grid view to view the hop-by-hop topology and connectivity affecting issues identified, or go to the metrics page for the selected connection monitor.

NSG Diagnostics is a powerful tool for security compliance and auditing, allowing organizations to map traffic, verify network security rules, and conduct periodic compliance audits by analyzing flow logs.

You can leverage NSG Diagnostics to assess the effectiveness of your NSG configurations and make informed decisions about security improvements.

Network Watcher's diagnostic logs and traffic analytics features turn on or off logging for network resources, providing detailed analysis of network traffic.

With Diagnostic Logs and Traffic Analytics, you can gain insights into application and user activity within the Azure cloud, enabling better decision-making regarding network management and security.

Diagnostic Toolkit provides access to all the diagnostic features available for troubleshooting the network, including packet capture, VPN troubleshoot, connection troubleshoot, next hop, and IP flow verify.

Resource monitoring is a crucial aspect of Azure network monitoring, and Azure Monitor network insights provides a centralized platform to monitor your networking resources. With this tool, you can view the health and metrics of all resources across selected subscriptions and resource groups.

The resource view helps you visualize how a resource is configured, providing a simplified view of how front-end IPs are connected to listeners, rules, and backend pools. You can access the resource view by selecting the topology icon next to the resource name in the metrics grid view.

You can also use the resource view to access configuration settings easily, right-clicking a backend pool to access other information, such as VM insights and Azure Network Watcher connection troubleshooting.

Azure Monitor network insights offers a range of resource types that have been onboarded, providing access to a resource-specific topology view and a built-in metrics workbook. These onboarded resources include application gateways, Azure Bastion, Azure Firewall, and many others.

Here are some of the onboarded resources:

By monitoring these resources, you can quickly identify issues and take corrective action to ensure optimal network performance.

Network traffic and connectivity are crucial aspects of Azure network monitoring. Azure Network Watcher's Diagnostic Logs and Traffic Analytics features provide detailed analysis of network traffic, enabling better decision-making regarding network management and security.

To monitor site-to-site connections, you can use the Site-to-Site Connections subview in PerfStack. This view displays average in and out bps for the selected connections.

Azure Network Watcher's Connectivity tab provides a visualization of all tests configured via Connection Monitor and Connection Monitor (classic). This tab displays the reachability status for each test, making it easy to identify connectivity issues.

The Traffic tab in Azure Network Watcher lists all network security groups in the selected subscriptions, resource groups, and locations. It also shows the ones configured for NSG flow logs and Traffic analytics.

You can use the IP Flow Verify diagnostic tool to identify connectivity issues by verifying IP flow against network security group (NSG) rules. This tool can determine whether a security rule is blocking traffic to or from a virtual machine (VM).

Here are some key features of IP Flow Verify:

Azure Network Watcher's Traffic Analytics feature provides a view of all Traffic Analytics workspace-based alerts across all subscriptions. You can select the alert counts to go to a detailed alerts page.

The Connectivity tab's Alert box on the right side of the page provides a view of all alerts generated for the connectivity tests configured across all subscriptions.

To configure Azure Network Watcher, you need to access the Azure portal. Simply click on “All Services” on the homepage.

You'll then need to search for “network watcher” in the search bar and click on it to access the service. This will allow you to explore different tabs for monitoring, diagnosis, and logs related to your virtual network.

To add virtual networks to Network Watcher, start by clicking on the “+Add” option. This will give you the opportunity to choose the Azure subscription and regions where your virtual networks are located.

You'll then need to select the subscription and regions from the list and click “Add” to include the virtual networks. Deployment may take 3-4 minutes.

Once the deployment is complete, be sure to click “Refresh” to view the newly added resource on the overview page for each region.

Azure Network Watcher pricing is based on the region and service availability, with no impact on other resources or associated charges for enabling it. However, specific elements within Network Watcher may incur costs.

Network Watcher includes 1,000 checks per month for the Network Diagnostic Tool, with Microsoft charging $1 per additional 1,000 checks. The Connections Monitor includes 10 tests per month, with tier-based charging for additional tests.

Azure Network Watcher incurs a monthly subscription fee starting from $0.3, with six distinct plans available. There is also a charge of $0.50 per additional GB of network logs collected, up to a maximum of 5 GB per month.

Network Watcher has several limits in place, including:

Azure Network Watcher has a monthly subscription fee starting from $0.3, with tier-based pricing for additional services.

Specific elements within Network Watcher may incur costs, such as collecting network logs, which are stored in a storage account and charged at $0.50 per additional GB collected.

You can set a retention policy for up to 365 days to limit storage costs, or Azure will retain the logs indefinitely if no policy is set.

Network Watcher includes 1,000 checks per month for the Network Diagnostic Tool, after which Microsoft charges $1 per additional 1,000 checks.

The Connections Monitor includes 10 tests per month, with tier-based charging for additional tests.

Azure Network Watcher provides six distinct plans with varying pricing, but the exact details of these plans are not specified in the provided information.

Azure has its fair share of limits when it comes to Network Watcher. One instance of Network Watcher is allowed per region per subscription.

Each subscription can have up to 100 connection monitors. These monitors help you troubleshoot network issues.

You can have a maximum of 20 test groups per connection monitor. This is useful for organizing your network tests.

The maximum number of sources and destinations per connection monitor is 100. This helps you scope your network tests effectively.

You can have a maximum of 20 test configurations per connection monitor. This is helpful for customizing your network tests.

Azure also has a limit on packet capture sessions per subscription. You can have up to 10,000 sessions, but captures are not saved.

VPN Troubleshoot operations are limited to one concurrent operation per subscription. This is to prevent overwhelming the system.

Here's a summary of the limits: