Book Image

Optimizing Microsoft Azure Workloads

By : Rithin Skaria
Book Image

Optimizing Microsoft Azure Workloads

By: Rithin Skaria

Overview of this book

It’s easy to learn and deploy resources in Microsoft Azure, without worrying about resource optimization. However, for production or mission critical workloads, it’s crucial that you follow best practices for resource deployment to attain security, reliability, operational excellence and performance. Apart from these aspects, you need to account for cost considerations, as it’s the leading reason for almost every organization’s cloud transformation. In this book, you’ll learn to leverage Microsoft Well-Architected Framework to optimize your workloads in Azure. This Framework is a set of recommended practices developed by Microsoft based on five aligned pillars; cost optimization, performance, reliability, operational excellence, and security. You’ll explore each of these pillars and discover how to perform an assessment to determine the quality of your existing workloads. Through the book, you’ll uncover different design patterns and procedures related to each of the Well-Architected Framework pillars. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to collect and assess data from an Azure environment and perform the necessary upturn of your Azure workloads.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
1
Part 1: Well-Architected Framework Fundamentals
4
Part 2: Exploring the Well-Architected Framework Pillars and Their Principles
10
Part 3: Assessment and Recommendations

Monitoring

By now, you know that monitoring is something inevitable regardless of which WAF pillar we are dealing with. Basically, we need insights into component failures, why the component failed, and when it failed. We have already seen how Azure Advisor and Azure Monitor play a crucial role in capturing the recommendations and insights related to the pillars of the WAF.

The following key points should be considered for monitoring the reliability of applications:

  • Use Application Insights to validate the availability of applications to ensure the availability metrics are met.
  • Collect application logs using Azure Monitor so that we can troubleshoot any application-related failures.
  • Ensure all application components are monitored and data ingested to a centralized location such as Azure Log Analytics.
  • All key metrics should be captured and plotted on dashboards for the applications and infrastructure teams to monitor. You can use Azure Workbooks or Grafana to...