As with any service or application, monitoring should be one of the top priorities in the overall solution design. It is important to monitor how well the overall system is functioning and how quickly issues are resolved when they arise. Without proper monitoring and alerting in place, there is no means to check the health of a system and to manage any service level agreements (SLA) that are in place.

Monitoring hybrid solutions is not an easy task as components of the system are now distributed across different locations and connected by networks that may vary in bandwidth and reliability. You also have fewer configuration options for cloud-hosted components and are reliant on the data center to provide their own monitoring tools.

With Microsoft Azure, you can use Azure Diagnostics to gather performance and diagnostic information about your components running on each infrastructure node. Azure Diagnostics has been specifically designed for...