Top 10 Best Azure Monitoring Tools (Pros and Cons)

Top 10 Best Azure Monitoring Tools (Pros and Cons). Azure monitoring tools help you monitor your cloud resources, performance, security, reliability, costs, and more. These tools are designed to ensure you use your platform to its full potential. They provide seamless end to end monitoring, allowing you to discover issues in your infrastructure or resources.

Azure provides you with a highly secure, scalable platform where you build, test, and deploy resources. After deploying your resources, you use the best Azure monitoring tools to gain visibility into the entire cloud environment. They make your work easier and help you stay ahead of issues that may affect your cloud performance.

This article discusses Top 10 Best Azure Monitoring Tools (Pros and Cons) with the ultimate features for easier cloud management:

10 Best Azure Monitoring Tools

1. nOps

nOps is an Azure monitoring platform designed to give you full visibility into your cloud. It ensures you run workloads that align with the Azure Well Architected best practices. Also, this tool provides automated discovery of your cloud resources, giving 360-degree visibility into your computing environment.

Secondly, nOps allows you to identify underutilized resources and allocate your cloud resources. All of these help optimize costs, so you don’t end up with huge bills. Additionally, you can also use nOps for security monitoring.  Besides, it provides simplified tracking of Identity and Access Management and customizable rules for automated security checks. In case of an anomaly in your Azure environment, nOps sends real time alerts so you can remediate the issues before they escalate.

Pros

  • Provides automated checks for Azure and AWS.
  • Provides a simplified change management dashboard for tracking changes and maintaining operational accountability.
  • Helps discover underutilized resources.
  • Easy to set up and get started.
  • User friendly and intuitive interface.

Cons

  • Limited free trial.
  • Provides limited DevOps monitoring.
  • Relatively expensive.
  • Not straightforward for non technical users.

2. OpsView

OpsView provides deep viability to your Azure services. With a single dashboard you can view all metrics and notifications. With OpsView, you monitor Virtual Machines, Storage Accounts, Load Balancers, and more.  Moreover. OpsView comes with a configuration wizard that eases the discovery of objects in your environment.

Pros

  • Has a log analytics feature that improves visibility and reporting.
  • Customizable dashboards.
  • Distributed model to enable you to monitor a vast amount of resources.
  • Reduces unexpected costs.
  • Monitors all metrics sufficiently.
  • OpsView has disaster recovery capabilities to enable users restore copies of data.

Cons

  • Difficult to configure notification profiles.
  • Relatively expensive compared to related tools.

3. SolarWinds

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) provides insights into the performance of your Azure infrastructure and apps. For example, you use the SolarWinds SAM to monitor your applications, virtual machines, and containers. Hence, this tool is designed to help you auto discover network communication between Virtual Machines.

Furthermore, SolarWinds easily integrates with Azure to monitor your complex cloud environment. Additionally, the dashboard collects all Azure resources onto one screen, where you can view metrics such as throughput, network latency, response times, connectivity, and more. Through SolarWinds, you can set an alert so that you receive an alert in real time when a certain threshold is passed. Besides Azure, you can also use SolarWinds to monitor Linux and Windows servers. 

Pros

  • Comes with pre configured templates for reporting.
  • Auto discovery of items such as ports and services.
  • Extends monitoring to local servers.
  • Flexible alerting that allows you to filter the type of alerts you want.

Cons

  • Not ideal for non technical users.
  • Upgrades take a lot of time. 

4. Zabbix

Zabbix is an open source monitoring tool for Azure. Further, you integrate Zabbix to monitor your infrastructure and remediate workflows for your DevOps. Fourthly, you can deploy Zabbix within your cloud infrastructure and improve the observability of your cloud environment. 

Being that, Zabbix collects multiple metrics from your Azure cloud and displays them in a single pane of glass. It detects problems in real time and enables you to determine the root of a problem. Evidently, its smart alerting tool sends notifications upon detecting anomalies in your cloud.

Pros

  • Complete documentation where each aspect is documented on.
  • Easy to scale and deploy via proxies.
  • Integrates seamlessly with Grafana to provide improved dashboarding and reporting.
  • It’s open source and free.
  • Supports a wide range of native technologies.
  • Wide range of monitoring options.

Cons

  • Building Zabbix to fit your environment can be time consuming.
  • The entire platform is difficult to understand.

5. Serverless360

Next solution of the Top 10 Best Azure Monitoring Tools is Serverless 360. is among the best Azure monitoring tools to maintain the observability of your computing environment. Equally, it is a powerful tool equipped with a range of features, including analytics and reporting capabilities. All you need is to have the necessary configurations and get instant feedback on your cloud health.

With Serverless360, you group services according to activity logs, map related dependencies, and monitor the performance. The tool creates a consolidated status report for all entities, allowing you to discover any issues seamlessly.

Pros

  • Allows users to audit Azure applications.
  • Has flexible subscription options.
  • Provides stunning data visualizations.
  • Creates dependency maps automatically.

Cons

  • It sometimes shows insights with errors.
  • Difficult to understand how the product works.
  • Limited free trial.

6. CloudMonix

CloudMonix is an Azure cloud monitoring service built with DevOps, CSPs, and MSPs in mind. Consequently, it provides advanced automation and cloud monitoring for services and applications deployed on Azure. Some of the top features include uptime monitoring, CPU monitoring, alert notifications, and more.

Pros

  • SaaS based monitoring allows easy setup.
  • Seamless integrations with WebHooks, Zendesk, Slack, PagerDuty, and Twilio.
  • Built for resources running in Azure Cloud environments.
  • Allows users to auto scale resources in real time.
  • Great alerting feature and integration with multiple tools.

Cons

  • The user interface is technical to understand.
  • If you have multiple Azure subscriptions, you have to create multiple accounts.

7. Splunk

Splunk provides real time monitoring to the Azure cloud. With Splunk, you can access log and metric data from all your Azure resources. Simply configure Splunk to receive metric and log data and stay ahead of issues before they affect performance in your cloud.

Pros

  • Handles vast amounts of data with maximum performance.
  • Provides end to end visibility for Azure services.
  • Use Splunk to proactively find and fix issues in seconds.
  • Alows users to search for queries easily and perform analytics.
  • Provides dynamic alerting conditions.
  • Ideal for multiple log sources.
  • Great customer and technical support.

Cons

  • Requires lots of manual configuration.
  • Limited default rules and customizations.

8. Site24x7

Site24x7 is a cloud based monitoring solution that allows you to obtain detailed insights into the performance and availability of over 100 Azure services. Ideally, you can monitor and track the performance of your entire Azure environment. Observe your Virtual Machines and containers. Also allows monitoring of Azure native services and databases.

Certainly, with Site24x7 correlates performance issues with errors and failures to help identify critical application problems. After detecting problems, Site24x7 enables automation of incident remediation.

Unlike numerous other Azure monitoring tools, Site24x7 is AI-powered. Besides, it predicts performance trends based on historical observations and time series forecasting models such as exponential smoothing. This way, it detects anomalies and unusual deviations in real time, helping you maintain optimal health and minimize downtime.

Pros

  • Provides support for hybrid cloud infrastructure.
  • Supports monitoring for load balancers, UPS, switches, and routers.
  • Supports numerous plugins.
  • Easily install it in a few minutes and start monitoring.

Cons

  • It can be overwhelming for a non technical user.
  • Time consuming for a large environment.

9. New Relic

New Relic integrates with Microsoft Azure, allowing you to monitor your cloud services. With New Relic, you can view your entire cloud architecture on a single platform. This tool gives better visibility into containers, infrastructure, managed services, applications, and more. With multi cloud monitoring capabilities, you can view Azure alongside on premise Linux and Windows machines.

Pros

  • Provides real time monitoring of Azure services and alerts in real time  as well.
  • Provides robust performance insights.
  • Provides comprehensive visibility during cloud migration.
  • Helps identify the root cause of problems.

Cons

  • Hard to understand user interface.
  • The metrics can be confusing for new users.

10. Datadog

Last choice on the list of Top 10 Best Azure Monitoring Tools is Datadog. Basically, another excellent choice for monitoring Azure applications. Features a full in-depth Azure integration that allows you to achieve 360-degree visibility into your Azure ecosystem. You can use it to monitor Azure services and receive actionable insights into Azure. Besides, you can use Datadog to monitor individual services running on Azure like Azure Kubernetes Service and the Azure App Service.

Another feature is scaling. Datadog scales automatically with the rapidly evolving Azure infrastructure. Captures data from rapidly evolving environments without any additional configurations.

Pros

  • Supports over 450 integrations.
  • You can easily set it up and receive out of the box dashboards and alerts.
  • Provides a great end user experience.
  • You can try its free trial without adding a credit card.
  • Interactive dashboards to monitor logs, metrics, and traces.

Cons

  • Has an initial learning curve and is overwhelming for new users
  • It has limited documentation which makes it difficult to understand

Thank you for reading Top 10 Best Azure Monitoring Tools. We should conclude.

Top 10 Best Azure Monitoring Tools (Pros and Cons) Conclusion

With the above Azure monitoring tools, you can easily monitor your Azure cloud environment. These tools help monitor Azure alongside other cloud environments. Besides, they offer simple integrations and out of the box features for Azure monitoring. They provide security, availability, and performance metrics, allowing you to identify issues and remediate them quickly.

Read our blog for more Azure tips like these!

Avatar for Dennis Muvaa
Dennis Muvaa

Dennis is an expert content writer and SEO strategist in cloud technologies such as AWS, Azure, and GCP. He's also experienced in cybersecurity, big data, and AI.

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