We are designing an application which will be hosted on AKS(Azure kubernetes service). The application will consist of a set of services written in asp .net core running in docker containers. I want to monitor the services as well as the containers/nodes and have the observability across the cluster. Azure monitor for containers seems to be a good solution for monitoring containers, nodes and the cluster as a whole however I want the advanced monitoring capabilities of the application insights for the asp .net core services for example application maps, live metrics streams, transaction tracing and such features. Moreover, I don't want to have overlapping solutions. Is the Azure monitor for containers able to provide all or most of these application insights features or do I have to have both solutions in order to get proper cluster monitoring and also the advanced application monitoring?
2 Answers
Azure Monitor for containers provide infrastructure level monitoring and basic application logs with stdout and stderr, Kubernetes events captured out of the box.
It does not provide instrumentation for your apps or distributed tracing capabilities today, which is possible with Application Insights.
If you are looking for application map & instrumentation for events metrics and logs for your app, you can use both together and it's possible to correlate data from both and create dashboards and views.
The long term road map has Azure Monitor for containers & Application insights combined offering
In this (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/insights/container-insights-overview) guide, you can find all the features of AKS monitoring. If these covers all your use cases then you don't need to install any other tool. If not, then you cover only those features which are missing.
