About the need for cloud monitoring using Microsoft Azure and Zabbix

There are several types of cloud services that need to be monitored.

Cloud monitoring is not just about monitoring servers hosted on AWS (Amazon Web Services) or Microsoft Azure.

It is also very important to monitor the cloud-based services that companies use or sell and offer to their customers. For example, a highly available customer server should not fail – and the services on such a server should never slow down or not start at all. There are different types of cloud-based services:

SaaS (Software as a Service): Services like Office 365

PaaS (Platform as a Service): Developer environments/services like SQL databases, SQL Pools, caching, storage etc.

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): Servers hosted by cloud providers like Azure, AWS and others

FaaS (Functions as a Service): Serverless applications such as Azure Functions

Many of these services are automatically monitored by the platforms which deliver them (for example Azure). But you can also use external services or tools to do a little more. For the users it is usually just a simple click through the colorful world of Office – a little Outlook here and a little Excel Online here. However, very few people are concerned about the infrastructure and the processes in the background. These things are also very interesting, at least for some.

We must also distinguish between two different types of monitoring.

The first type is the in-house tools from the cloud providers, which don’t really need to undergo much installation since they are usually integrated in the service plans and therefore configuration requires little effort.

The second type, on the other hand, is when the functions of third party software such as Zabbix are used. Zabbix is an enterprise open source solution for central server monitoring. You can install the agent on machines such as Windows Server 2012 R2 and configure the agent to send regular checks to the Zabbix server.

A web portal provided by the Zabbix server enables various things to be queried using different templates.
One such useful application can be used to query services. You can query whether certain services are running and, in the event of a failure, have e-mails sent to you so that you can react quickly at any point.

Basically, all queries can be implemented using such a tool.

Cloud monitoring can be used to observe metrics and events and to reveal anomalies. This makes it possible to optimize performance (availability, response behavior), to minimize failures, to handle performance issues or to analyze capacity.