Once we have systems live on Azure, we need to monitor their health so that if a system is failing, we are aware of it and can start fixing it as quickly as possible. There are a number of tools within Azure that we can use to help us monitor our service, and we'll take a look at these in this section.
The main dashboard in the portal is a great way of getting an overview of all the services (you may need to page through them) as we get a simple visual indicator for each service that shows us its state. The new preview portal also has a nice world map that shows the status of all the data centers. If there is a problem with a service, we can quickly navigate to it and get more information from its own dashboard, and then start diagnosing the issue.
Checking the portal is a good activity to perform daily in order to ensure the general health of the services, and for system administrators this can be added to their existing daily checks.