How to monitor resource utilization in Azure

Monitoring the utilization of your resources is a critical aspect of cloud computing.

Companies rely heavily on cloud services to host their applications and data in today’s fast-paced digital world.

However, with increased reliance on cloud services comes the need to better understand and control resource utilization.

This is where Azure Monitoring comes in.

In this blog, you’ll learn how to monitor resource usage in Azure.

We will explore the importance of resource utilization monitoring and why it is relevant to developers, cloud engineers.

Step-by-step guide to set up Metrics for Azure Resource, and techniques available to find resource utilization in Azure.

To keep a check on the availability, performance, and operation of resources, Azure Monitor is utilized.

It is a monitoring service that offers features to monitor resources in Azure. Additionally, Azure Monitor can also be used to monitor resources in other clouds and in on-premise environments.

Importance of resource utilization monitoring

Monitoring resource utilization is critical to keep cloud applications and services up and running.

Here are some of the reasons why monitoring resource utilization is important and why it’s relevant to developers and cloud engineers:

1. Optimize your performance

Developers and cloud engineers can identify areas where performance can be improved by monitoring resource utilization.

For example, if an application is using too much CPU, memory, or bandwidth, developers can tweak the code to reduce the resources used and improve performance.

2. Help manage costs

Cloud computing services, Azure included, are frequently charged by resource utilization, such as CPU, memory, and bandwidth.

By monitoring resource utilization, cloud engineers can identify and address any instances of waste or inefficiency, which can lead to cost savings.

3. Scalability

Resource requirements increase as applications grow. By monitoring resource utilization, cloud engineers can anticipate and proactively resolve scalability problems to keep apps running at peak performance.

4. Know when to respond

Cloud engineers can identify potential issues that could affect the availability of an application or service by monitoring resource utilization.

Avoid downtime and ensure the application remains available to users by identifying and resolving these issues early.

Sooner you know, sooner you can start trying to figure out how to fix it or get technical support from the cloud provider.

Now it’s time for you to set up and monitor your resources.

Step by step

Let’s navigate to the Azure Monitor service in the Azure portal.

Step 1

Select the resource you want to monitor

For example, a virtual machine, container, PaaS database server or host.

In this case we have selected Virtual Machine:

Step 2

Go to the Monitoring section of the resource’s dashboard on Menu section. Search for Metrics:

Step 3

Select the metrics you want to monitor, such as CPU utilization, IOPS utilization

Highlighted in the image is how you can add different metrics in the same view, by clicking on Add Metric, with aggregation, honestly, will recommend you to use aggregation such as Max and Average to determine the workload, and select the time stamp.

Save the chart by exporting to a file or saving as a dashboard.

Repeat this process for each resource you want to monitor.

In addition to resource utilization monitoring, Azure Monitor also has other features such as log analysis, alerting, and automation.

These features let you set automated notifications for specific usage thresholds, analyze logs for trends and anomalies, and automate actions based on usage data.

Conclusion

Resource usage monitoring is a part of cloud computing that provides critical information about the functionality, cost, flexibility, reliability of cloud-based software and services.

Developers and Cloud Engineers are responsible that cloud computing operations run smoothly and available.