In this lesson, you will prepare your own lab environment by obtaining a free trial to work with Microsoft Azure. We will discuss the options that come with the free trial and remember to never practice labs from this or any other Microsoft course in the real world environment. After creating a login and password, utilize them to log into the Azure portal. Once this has been completed, we are ready to jump into this short course.

This lesson covers key concepts of creating Log Workspaces for the purpose of data collection for Azure Services. The data that is collected is specific to each service, which will be detailed in future lessons of this short course. Monitoring and Alerting are crucial techniques used to keep all cloud services running smoothly, cost-effective, and reportable. The Azure Portal offers a centralized location to create, manage, monitor, implement, and deploy services and monitoring. The data collection result sets can be queried with a language called KQL in real time so you can be alerted to issues immediately for intervention and solutioning. Because Azure is a cloud product, the servers can be managed from anywhere in the world, 24/7.

This lesson will conceptualize monitoring for web applications so you can learn about the automated experience Application Insights delivers, which will give better than expected results, with a few clicks. However, behind the scenes of Monitoring Web Apps, they can also create custom workspaces and logs for specific categories and Services in Azure, in addition to the automated resources. The lesson will focus on Web Applications, with the expectation that Web Applications, Virtual Machines, and Virtual Networks are the most important and commonly used Azure Services that will require monitoring.

In this lesson, you may be pleased to learn that monitoring Virtual Machines in the Azure Portal will also take advantage of some automation that will cut down your time in the real world for creating workspaces and logs. The process is concise, clear and easy to comprehend so that the Learners will walk away with the skills necessary to implement this on your own Azure environments.

Virtual Networks encompass other Azure Services, such as Virtual Machines, Web Applications, Firewalls, Network Security Groups, and so much more. As a result, a monitoring plan must be created with careful strategy and have compliance, and business standards in mind. In this Lesson, we will examine some built-in monitoring events, and assemble various settings to assist us in the detailed tracking and monitoring of the Virtual Network as a whole, and as the primary piece of the architecture. You should be prepared to strategize with members of your team in the real world to plan priorities for these settings, since monitoring takes place in prioritization order.

This lesson is designed so that it ends the short course with confidence that the Learners can be automatically alerted to performance issues, rather than using time-consuming tasks of the past to investigate and remediate problems. With Azure Alerts and Triggers, the Services can alert you, similar to how you get alerted by emails or chats. The Learners will walk away confident that they will be able to rest easy, knowing that they have set up everything properly and they can now let Azure Monitor do the arduous task of monitoring.