Azure monitoring tools are excellent at keeping an eye on your applications and services running on the Azure platform so that you can spot performance and availability issues and fix them in time.
In the age of competition, you don’t really have a choice but to offer the best-performing solutions to the users.
They expect faster and smoother applications to support their tasks and a greater level of security to ensure they are safe from more attacks and data leaks.
Hence, you must constantly monitor your applications for availability and performance, which is easy with Azure monitoring tools.
This way, you can ensure your applications and services are up and running with top-notch speed all the time and are secure by spotting issues faster and launching quick remedies early.
In this article, I’ll discuss this more and then introduce you to the best Azure monitoring tools for your applications and services running on Azure.
What Is Azure?
Microsoft Azure is a leading cloud computing platform developed and operated by Microsoft. It offers software-as-a-service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). It supports multiple programming languages, frameworks, and tools provided by Microsoft and third parties.
Azure is also an online portal that allows people to access and manage various cloud resources, applications, and services that store and transform your data based on your needs. In fact, it offers 200+ cloud services and products to help you design new solutions and run and scale existing ones in its public cloud.

Using the Azure portal, you can access these services and resources. They are available to meet organizations’ demands from various verticals, from finance and health to eCommerce, technology, and many more.
Some Azure products and services include:
- Networking: Azure CDN, Azure DNS, virtual network, and Express Route
- Compute services like virtual machines in Linux, Windows, etc., cloud services, service fabric for microservices, and functions to create applications.
- Storage: File storage, disk storage, blob storage, and queue storage.
- Identity: Azure Active Directory and information protection
- Mobile services: Mobile Engagement to collect analytics in real-time, HockeyApp, etc.
- Communication services: SDK to create communication apps
- Data Management: Azure Data Lake, Data Explorer, Cosmos DB, HDInsight, etc.
And many more.
What Do You Mean by Azure Monitoring?
Azure Monitoring is the process of monitoring, collecting, aggregating, and analyzing the KPIs of different services that Microsoft Azure Cloud offers.

You can monitor Azure services with the help of various Azure monitoring and troubleshooting tools available in the market, such as Microsoft Azure Monitor, Paessler PRTG, and more.
This helps you ensure high performance and uptime of your Azure services and take care of their security and proper resource allocation and consumption.
Why Should You Care About Azure Monitoring?
Microsoft Azure is an advanced cloud platform offering services with flexibility, rich features, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.
However, any application can be affected due to issues related to performance, availability, security, etc. As a result, you will find it challenging to manage the performance and overall health of your applications running on Azure.
And if it’s not addressed, it can slow down your applications to annoy users, turn vulnerabilities into security disasters, and cause data privacy risks. All this is neither good for end-users nor businesses.
This is why using Azure monitoring tools is beneficial. These tools will monitor your Azure services and collect metrics to help you analyze and spot issues to troubleshoot them quickly. Hence, you can keep your services running with optimal performance in the cloud on on-premises. In addition, it will offer plenty of other benefits like optimizing your cloud expenses by helping you allocate resources smartly, avoid over and under consumption, and eliminate ideal resources.
Now, let’s discover some of the best Azure monitoring tools in the market.
ManageEngine Applications Manager
Visualize your Azure environment thoroughly, run business-critical workloads optimally, and troubleshoot performance-related issues faster with ManageEngine’s Azure monitoring tool. It helps ensure all your critical processes and services are running well by collecting, working, and analyzing the telemetry from on-premises and cloud environments.
With this tool, you will get deep visibility into all your infrastructure and applications to identify issues and resolve them to maintain consistent performance. It utilizes Azure APIs to integrate with Azure to collect data, aggregate metrics, and show everything on the dashboard. This will enable you to monitor performance metrics without installing collectors or agents.
Furthermore, Applications Manager will help you track your Microsoft domain and dependencies and move to Azure with better confidence. You can also monitor resource usage to ensure they are not under or over-used while eliminating idle resources to save costs.
Proactively monitor your Azure KPIs by collecting stats in real-time and aggregating them to perform historical analysis. You also get forecast reports with machine learning methods to predict growth and resource consumption. In addition, you can configure alerts easily, trigger them in real-time when an issue arises, and receive them via email, Slack, or text.
Applications Manager offers sophisticated root cause analysis to detect and diagnose the problems faster by automating tasks through webhooks. It integrates with ITSM tools like ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus for incident management. You can also utilize it to scale cloud resources automatically based on system load, offering you the required computation power.
Paessler PRTG
Get an all-in-one performance monitoring tool – Paessler PRTG, a cloud infrastructure that can help you monitor, optimize, and secure your Azure infrastructure. It can track Azure resources and offers prompt alerts if any performance issue or downtime occurs.
This Azure monitoring tool provides an overview of Azure applications, resources, and applications. It will improve your troubleshooting capabilities and ensure higher application availability and performance.
By monitoring your complete IT infrastructure, PRTG will help reduce cloud risks and configure local networks to adapt to the cloud. It also significantly reduces troubleshooting time and bypasses issues easily and quickly. It provides a concise and customizable dashboard to visualize measured application metrics and insights.

PRTG will empower you with relevant load and performance data along with valuable insights from your systems and applications so you can make the right decisions. Get informed automatically by defining your threshold values and choose how to receive alerts – by push notifications, emails, and text. In addition, monitor Azure metrics in a centralized dashboard and excellent reporting features that are customizable.
Moreover, PRTG can monitor your VMs to keep them running all the time with the help of sensors and displays their CPU usage and CPU credit remaining. This way, you can optimize your Azure subscription cost. You can use any of the 18 Azure sensors by AutomonX, a partner of Paessler, and connect it with your Azure environment via a REST API to collect data and metrics.
Getting started with PRTG is easy within minutes and is compatible with various mobile devices. You can download its cloud-based version or Windows desktop version and use any of the 9 supported languages, including English.
PRTG is free for up to 100 sensors.
Serverless360
Get an advanced cloud management solution – Serverless360 focused on Azure that comes with enterprise-level monitoring, tracking, governance, and remediation and operates your systems efficiently.
Azure portal is robust and powerful to develop complex solutions capable of handling support tasks and lets you innovate by automating functional errors. Serverless360 offers sophisticated contextual visualization, can resolve issues faster, and helps you delight your customers.
Get complete visibility on your Azure infrastructure using a business lens and triage incidents. You can also convert live data from Azure services into valuable insights on security, cost, and usage. In addition, it offers end-to-end tracking, controls different Azure services to drive business, and helps you resolve failures.
Serverless360 provides live dashboards and aggregate error reports on KPIs and lets you see your complete Azure applications and their dependencies in interactive maps. It also enables self-healing to counteract operational failures and saves your time on complex troubleshooting.
Furthermore, Serverless360 offers structured documentation on your Azure subscription, including a detailed usage report, examining expenditure trends, and automatically scanning services to assess security posture. Its desktop applications support Linux, macOS, and Windows platforms.
You will get more features like granular user access, governance and auditing, different hosting options, notifications, profile monitoring, and more.It offers a FREE trial.
Microsoft Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor by none other than Microsoft is an excellent option to get complete visibility of your infrastructure, network, and applications. It allows you to collect telemetry data from your Azure infrastructure to analyze and take quick action.
By proactively monitoring and identifying issues in your Azure services, you can maximize their availability and performance. You will get a centralized, scalable, and fully-managed data store optimized for cost and performance. You can also test hypotheses and discover patterns through an advanced analytics engine, built-in ML constructs, and interactive query language.

Azure Monitor integrates with popular IT service management, issue management, DevOps, event management, and security information management tools. Whether your Azure services are hosted on the cloud or on-premises, you can easily monitor their usage, uptime, and performance.
This tool can analyze your entire IT infrastructure, including VMs, databases, Azure Storage, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), along with the network. It can trigger a data packet capture, analyze security, control and visualize the Azure network, and diagnose routing problems.
It also supports famous frameworks and languages such as Java, Node.js, .NET, and tools like Jira, Azure DevOps, PagerDuty, etc., to track requests, live metrics, events, and response times.
SolarWinds
Use Azure Performance Monitoring by SolarWinds to track and monitor your Azure services. Its Hybrid Cloud Observability offers network management and monitors all your cloud services, infrastructure, applications, databases, and networks.
This tool will help you realize rapid time-to-value, speed up issue remediation, ensure greater service uptime levels, and gain agility and productivity. The SolarWinds Server and Application Manager (SAM) is a robust Azure monitoring tool that monitors your complete environment and offers insights and overviews.

It’s a centralized dashboard that offers insights into the performance of your systems, infrastructure, and applications respective of where they are. You can also visualize metrics, correlate them across your environment, and configure alerts. It also offers an auto-discovery feature to ensure the monitoring includes Azure containers and cloud VMs.
Furthermore, you can track the performance of your IaaS and PaaS services, Microsoft applications, services, and cloud resources with agent/agentless monitoring. You can monitor the performance of Microsoft products like Windows, SQL Server, Skype, SharePoint, IIS Server, Office 365, and more.
Try it free for 30 days. Or, take the full suite of Azure performance monitoring tools starting at $1,663.
Datadog
Datadog offers monitoring for 40+ Azure services by collecting and unifying all the data streaming from complex environments via easy-to-install integrations. You can deploy this Datadog Agent on their Azure VMs directly, start collecting metrics and enjoy greater granularity.
Datadog’s unique integration dashboards allow you to get a higher view into your infrastructure’s health along with deeper visibility into your individual services like Azure App Services and AKS. It enables you to track each phase of migrations to Azure by empowering you with seamless tracking of service performance side-by-side throughout the migration procedure.

This way, you can meet your expected benchmarks. It supports 500+ integrations to monitor various technologies and infrastructure. IT infrastructure teams can utilize the Host map and monitor data in real-time, like network and CPU utilization across all VMs and availability zones, to view performance faster or before a migration.
You will also get ML-driven features like forecasting to address application issues before they could affect customers. Datadog lets you create an adoption strategy and ensures the environment is ready for cloud migration while taking care of workloads.It provides a single source of truth to help you better plan, track migration’s progress, and spot issues when they arise.
You will also get deeper visibility into your hybrid, on-prem, and multi-cloud environments. Use Datadog’s Service Map to visualize dependencies between your cloud and on-prem databases, containers, VMs, etc., and track data easily. It also automatically scales your AKS, Azure Functions, and Azure App Services to support higher traffic and increasing demand.
Datadog gives you the confidence to deploy your services and offers plenty of tools to share and review data. It also supports integrations with tools like PagerDuty, Jira, Teams, and more.
Dynatrace
Get advanced observability into your complete Azure environment with Dynatrace’s Azure monitoring. It offers AI-assisted and fully-automated observability across your systems and provides a single source of truth for entire cloud platforms to ensure the infrastructure’s health.
You will get full-stack observability quickly in minutes with traces, logs, and metrics. Dynatrace will also help with auto-discovery, instant answers, and continuous dependency to automate monitoring for Azure cloud services, such as AKS, HDInsight, Database Performance, App Service, and more.

Get wider visibility of hosts, orchestration and containers, VMs, events, devices, and networks with AI-based root cause detection. You can integrate this platform with Azure to monitor your Azure cloud services without requiring manual configuration. You will also get real-time observability with continuous support.
Furthermore, Davis is Dynayrtace’s AI that helps continuously analyze dependencies to offer accurate root cause analysis. It enables you to resolve issues faster, capture transactions automatically across each tier, even at the code level and baseline performance, and adapt to the changes in your environment.
Dynatrace is also helpful in transforming your DevOps processes with event-driven automated operations and continuous delivery, improved code quality, shortened development lifecycle, and monitoring DevOps tools. It can accelerate your cloud migrations and boost cross-team collaboration.
It comes with a FREE trial.
Zabbix
Zabbix helps you monitor Azure services, infrastructure, clouds, and virtual machines. You will get vendor monitoring templates for your Azure VMs and support reading problem diagnostic data for VMs on Azure.

You can access a Python script and start monitoring the health of your Azure services from Zabbix. It also integrates with Azure API for monitoring. In addition, you can request custom integration according to Zabbix best practices and your requirements.
ZenPacks
Use ZenPack to monitor your Azure subscription and stay informed of performance and uptime issues. It helps you discover issues faster and keep an eye on application service and storage service components.

In addition, you get event management capability along with the option to monitor some Azure states. You can also check service impact and receive reports showing unattached VHDs.
Conclusion
Monitor your Azure applications and services with Azure monitoring tools to spot and fix issues easily. It will help you ensure they are running with optimal performance, uptime, and security.
Hence, choose the best Azure monitoring tools from the above list based on your preference and business needs.
FAQs
What are the tools for monitoring in Azure? ›
- Azure Monitor. ...
- Azure Advisor. ...
- Azure Automation. ...
- Microsoft Cost Management and Billing. ...
- Azure Service Health. ...
- Azure Network Watcher. ...
- Azure Resource Health.
1. Serverless360. Serverless360 Azure VM Monitoring Tool is an advanced cloud management platform primarily focusing on managing and monitoring Microsoft Azure Services.
Which Azure service is used for monitoring and analyzing application performance? ›Azure Monitor is a comprehensive monitoring solution for collecting, analyzing, and responding to monitoring data from your cloud and on-premises environments. You can use Azure Monitor to maximize the availability and performance of your applications and services.
Which feature of Azure Monitor allows you to visually analyze telemetry data choose the correct answer? ›Rationale: Application Insights is a feature of Azure Monitor that allows you to analyze telemetry data visually. It is an Application Performance Management (APM) service that detects performance in real-time.
What are two Azure management tools? ›In addition to the graphical user interface offered at the Azure Portal, we have the ability to manage and interact with Azure via Azure Powershell, Azure Command Line Interface (CLI), Azure Cloud Shell, and the Azure Mobile Application available on iOS and Android platforms.
What are the monitoring tools? ›Monitoring tools, also known as observability solutions, are designed to track the status of critical IT applications, networks, infrastructures, websites and more. The best IT monitoring tools quickly detect problems in resources and alert the right respondents to resolve critical issues.
How do I Monitor Azure performance? ›- In the Azure portal, select Virtual machine scale sets.
- From the list, select a VM.
- In the Monitoring section, select Insights to view the Performance tab.
- Step 1: Verify that VMs can communicate with each other. ...
- Step 2: Check the Network security group settings. ...
- Step 3: Check whether you can connect to the destination VM by using Remote Desktop or SSH. ...
- Step 4: Perform a connectivity check.
Install and run performance diagnostics on your VM
Performance diagnostics installs a VM extension that runs a diagnostics tool that is named PerfInsights. PerfInsights is available for both Windows and Linux.
Collect, analyze, and act on telemetry data from your cloud and hybrid environments. Azure Monitor supports your operations at scale by helping you maximize the performance and availability of your resources and proactively identify problems.
What two types of data are used by Azure Monitor? ›
Azure Monitor collects data from various sources. These sources include logs and metrics from the Azure platform and resources, custom applications, and agents running on virtual machines.
Which Azure tool has a set of tools for monitoring allocating and optimizing Azure? ›CloudCheckr for Azure includes a range of tools, such as cloud visibility, resource usage optimization, security monitoring, and compliance management for Azure customers.
Which of the following are tools could be helpful in monitoring the Azure functions? ›You can also monitor the function app itself by using Azure Monitor. To learn more, see Monitoring Azure Functions with Azure Monitor.
Which Azure monitoring feature will allow developers to improve app performance and usability? ›Answer is Azure Application Insights.
This is a feature of Azure Monitor, is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for web developers on multiple platforms. Use it to monitor your live web application. It will automatically detect performance anomalies.
Azure Monitor Agent (AMA) collects monitoring data from the guest operating system of Azure and hybrid virtual machines and delivers it to Azure Monitor for use by features, insights, and other services, such as Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for Cloud.
How do I monitor services in Azure? ›You can access Azure Monitor features from the Monitor menu in the Azure portal. You can also access Azure Monitor features directly from the menu for different Azure services.
What is the tool used for Azure? ›Azure Storage Explorer
However, managing the files, blobs, and queues through the Portal, CLI, PowerShell, or APIs is downright frustrating most of the time. The Azure Storage Explorer is a free tool that, once installed, works like Windows Explorer for all your Azure storage.
Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity.