Monitor Azure is a cloud-based solution that can collect different types of telemetry data, analyze them and take certain actions. Among the various features provides the ability to monitor the health of the networking, connectivity to applications and is able to provide detailed information on network performance. All this not only for cloud environments, but even in the presence of hybrid architectures. This article shows important changes that were recently announced by Microsoft to make the solution even more comprehensive.
Before focusing on the new features that have been introduced it is good to specify that Azure Monitor includes different specific solutions to monitor the Azure networking, including Network Performance Monitor (NPM), The suite includes the following features:
In addition to the tools included in the Network Performance Monitor (NPM) you can use Traffic Analytics, allowing you to have an overall visibility on network activities that are undertaken in the cloud environment. How this solution works is based on the principle that in Azure, to allow or deny network communication to Azure Virtual Networks-connected resources (vNet), it uses the Network Security Group (NSG), containing a list of access rules. The NSGs are applied to network interfaces connected to the virtual machines, or directly to the subnet (recommended). The platform uses NSG flow logs to maintain the visibility of inbound and outbound network traffic from the Network Security Group. Traffic Analytics is based on the analysis ofNSG flow logs and after an appropriate aggregation of data, inserting the necessary intelligence concerning security, topology and geographic map, can provide detailed information about the network traffic of your Azure cloud environment. The news that interests Traffic Analytics is that you can now process this data more frequently, at time intervals each time 10 minutes, against the 60 minutes previously possible.
Figure 1 – Traffic Analytics Processing Frequency
Azure Monitor for Networks
For greater visibility into network activities in the cloud Microsoft released Azure Monitor for Networks that introduces a useful visual view on the health of all network resources in your environment, enriched by their metrics. Everything is available without the need to make any specific configuration.
Figure 2 – Overview of Azure Monitor for Networks
In the top pane, you can set up search parameters to quickly identify the resources of interest, while on the right there is a panel showing any critical alerts.
Selecting individual components gives you more detail.
Figure 3 – VPN connection status details
In particular, currently only for Application Gateways, a very useful view of the Dependency, which helps you pinpoint component configuration and track error conditions more quickly. This representation shows the relationships between the front-end IPs, the listeners, the rules and the backend pool of Application Gateway. Colors make it easy to identify problematic health states on resources.
The view also lists key metrics for Application Gateways.
Figure 4 – List of Application Gateways
Figure 5 - Dependency view of a specific Application Gateway
The graph also allows easy access to the various component configurations. In order to identify connectivity issues and start troubleshooting operations, you have the option, right-clicking on the single virtual machine, of access directly to VM Insight and to Connection troubleshoot.
Figure 6 – Access resources to do machine troubleshooting
Conclusions
The new solution Network Insights present in Azure Monitor allows you to have a comprehensive view of network resources in a simple and intuitive way. The solution is particularly useful in the presence of complex environments and the console of Dependency view is a help also to document the implementations of the Application Gateway. It is currently a feature in preview and as such will surely be enriched in the short term with further news, allowing you to have a more complete and intuitive monitor of the network architecture in Azure.
