Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor is Microsoft’s unified observability platform that collects, analyzes, and acts on telemetry from Azure, on-premises, multi-cloud, and hybrid environments—providing metrics, logs, traces, and change tracking in a single pane of glass. It powers real-time dashboards, workbooks, and Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries in Log Analytics workspaces, while Application Insights delivers end-to-end application performance monitoring (APM) with distributed tracing, smart alerts, and AI-driven anomaly detection. Integrate with Microsoft Sentinel, Grafana, Power BI, or export to storage for long-term retention—all with enterprise-grade security and compliance (GDPR, HIPAA, FedRAMP).

In 2025, Azure Monitor offers a generous free tier (5 GB/month ingestion + 31 days retention) and pay-as-you-go pricing starting at $2.76/GB ingested, $0.10/GB archived, and $0.258/million metric time-series—plus commitment tiers for up to 60% savings. Features like autoscale recommendations, VM insights, container insights (AKS), and Copilot-powered natural-language diagnostics help teams reduce MTTR by 50%+. Whether you’re monitoring VMs, Kubernetes, serverless apps, or entire cloud estates, Azure Monitor delivers the actionable insights needed for proactive operations and cost optimization.