Is Azure Monitor a good store for custom application performance monitoring

1
votes

We have legacy applications that currently write out various run time metrics (SQL calls run time, api / http request run times etc) to local SQL DB.

format:( source, event, data, executionduration)

We are moving away from storing those in local SQL DB, and are now publishing those same metrics to azure event hub.

Looking for a good place to store those metrics for the purpose of monitoring the health of the application. Simple solution would be to store in some DB and build custom application to visualize the data in custom ways.

We are also considering using Azure Monitor for this purpose via data collector API (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/platform/data-collector-api)

QUESTION: Are there any issues with azure monitor that would prevent us from achieving this type of health monitoring?

Details

  • each event is small (few hundred characters)
  • expecting ~ 10 million events per day
  • retention of 1-2 days is enough
  • ability to aggregate old events per source per event is important (to have historical run time information)

Thank you

1
azureazure-log-analyticsazure-monitoring
There are some other considerations that will be very specific to your needs. Azure Monitor will store large data sets for you without issue, but you may find the interface for querying metric data more limiting or more confusing than other commercial and open source Time Series Databases. If querying data is infrequent and done by a small set of trained users, it's probably a very good option. There is very little cost associated with testing a small data set and verifying your use case. – logicaldiagram
thanks @logicaldiagram, yes, querying will be done by few tech people. However, I need a visualization dashboard for non-tech people (like, X requests of this type in last hour, average processing time of Y in last hour, most time consuming events etc). Trivial to do in custom DB, not sure how azure monitoring will do in this – Greg Balajewicz
You can do some simple graphs and with the Log Analytics query language, you can do just about any form of data analytics you need. – logicaldiagram
@logicaldiagram can you easily visualize the metrics per source? Sort of like Application Insights – Greg Balajewicz
Here's a pretty good article on Monitor Visualizations. But, yes, you should be able to. docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/log-query/charts – logicaldiagram

1 Answers

1
votes

You can do some simple graphs and with the Log Analytics query language, you can do just about any form of data analytics you need.

Here's a pretty good article on Monitor Visualizations.

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/log-query/charts