Motivation
Azure Monitor is an amazing suite of technologies that lets you collect, visualize, and act on data from your Azure resources. You can use metrics and logs to monitor the health and performance of any Azure resource. Microsoft offers tailored experiences for specific workloads, such as Virtual Machine Insights. Some of these experiences also include alerts and modern dashboards (Grafana) to help you act and troubleshoot issues. However, for server-based workloads, such as IIS, Print Servers, DNS, and others, there was no native cloud solution for monitoring. Until now.
The Azure Monitor Starter Packs (or “MonStar” packs) is a set of pre-configured components that provide monitoring configuration for multiple Azure resources without the need to create rules, alerts or dashboards. The monitoring features will be ready for assignment and consumption as soon as deployed.
Each pack will contain the required rules to collect the pertinent information (DCRs), the Alert Rules to inform about observations (alerts) and Dashboards (Grafana) to visualize the data.
Deployment
The deployment process is as simple as clicking a button in the repository:
For details on how to deploy, please refer to the documentation here. Once deployed, frontend and backend components will be leveraged to provide management experience, collect data and act (alerting) on specified thresholds.
The main workbook is the front end to the solution and will allow enabling and disabling monitoring as well as checking the status of the monitored resources.
In the backend, a Logic App in conjunction with a Function app make the actions from the workbook possible. Operations like enabling and disabling monitoring, enabling or disabling alerts can be triggered from the workbook.
Coverage
Currently, the are packs for the following technologies:
- IIS 2012 and 2016
- DNS 2016
- Print Server 2016
- Nginx
- Windows OS and Linux OS (using VM Insights).
Collaboration
New packs can be built by leveraging the existing modules and creating bicep files based on a template. Details on how to build a pack can be found here.
If you find any issues, please report them in the repository.
Start using the Azure Monitor Starter Packs today!