With the metrics in place, you need to find a way to let us know whether something is wrong or needs the attention of an administrator.

For the metrics we have configured, we are able to set up alerts. If a certain condition is met, Azure will let you know that something is wrong with the virtual machine.

The alerts will make you aware of the issues and also allow you to do some capacity planning. Do you need to scale your cloud infrastructure to cope with the increasing demands for computing services?

Here, we will set up some alerts based on the metrics we have set up for one of our virtual machines. We will use the SQL Server virtual machine and run the code—bad code— against the virtual machine to chew up enough Azure resources to make the alert fire.

Here, assume that all the basic monitoring counters have been enabled for the virtual machine, GethynEllisSQL...