Enhancing Observability with Azure Native ISV Services and Third-Party Integrations

This article is an excerpt from the book, "Cloud Observability with Azure Monitor", by José Ángel Fernández, Manuel Lázaro Ramírez. This book is your guide to understanding the dynamic landscape of cloud monitoring with Azure Monitor. You’ll gain practical insights into designing the monitoring strategies for your Azure resources with the help of examples and best practices.

Introduction

As organizations strive to maintain robust and comprehensive monitoring solutions, leveraging Azure Native ISV (Independent Software Vendor) services becomes increasingly valuable. These services are specifically designed to integrate seamlessly with Azure, providing enhanced monitoring, analytics, and management capabilities that complement Azure’s native tools. By incorporating ISV solutions, organizations can take advantage of specialized features, advanced analytics, and tailored monitoring capabilities that address unique business needs and operational requirements.

In this article, we will explore the Azure Native ISV services available for monitoring. We’ll discuss the available service integration with Azure Monitor, their distinct advantages, and the added value they bring to your observability strategy. We will explore some of those services provided by Datadog, Elastic, Logz.io, Dynatrace, and New Relic. We’ll discuss the options these services provide to integrate with the Azure platform, as well as the benefits they offer.

Azure Native Datadog

Azure Native Datadog is a powerful, cloud-native monitoring and security platform that integrates seamlessly with Azure. Designed to provide comprehensive visibility into the health and performance of your applications and infrastructure, Datadog offers robust features such as real-time metrics, advanced analytics, and customizable dashboards. With Azure Native Datadog, organizations can monitor Azure resources alongside other cloud and on-premises environments, enabling a unified approach to observability.

Datadog’s integration with Azure enables the automatic discovery and monitoring of Azure resources, including virtual machines, databases, and services. It provides real-time monitoring through continuous collection and analysis of metrics, logs, and traces from your Azure environment. It supports both IaaS and PaaS environments, thanks to its extensive integration with more than 40 services.

Information collected can be used for advanced analytics and custom dashboards. You can utilize machine learning algorithms to detect anomalies and forecast trends, gain insights into application performance, and create detailed visualizations tailored to your specific needs, combining data from Azure and other sources.

Security is also relevant, thanks to its alerting and incident management capabilities. Set up proactive alerts and manage incidents efficiently to minimize downtime and impact. Improve your security inside Azure through its Cloud Security management features.

By leveraging Azure Native Datadog, organizations benefit from single-pane-of-glass visibility in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Its costs are integrated into your Azure monthly bill directly, and access is transparent through the single sign-on integration.

Metrics and activity log ingestion are automatically configured, and installation of the custom Datadog agents can be automated for your virtual machines. 

More information is available at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/partnersolutions/datadog/create.

Azure Native Elastic Cloud

Azure Native Elastic is an integrated solution that combines the power of Elasticsearch, Kibana, and other Elastic Stack components with Azure’s cloud capabilities. Elastic offers robust search, observability, and security solutions that help organizations gain deep insights into their Azure environments. By using Azure Native Elastic, you can seamlessly ingest, search, and visualize data from Azure resources, enabling advanced analytics and improved operational efficiency.

Elastic’s integration with Azure provides a seamless experience for deploying and managing its CloudNative Observability Platform. It is provided as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application through the Azure Marketplace, which centralizes log, metric, and trace analytics, simplifying the monitoring of Azure environments for Elastic clients.

Users can manage Elastic solutions directly through the Azure portal, implementing monitoring for cloud workloads via a streamlined workflow. Provisioning Elastic resources is facilitated by a custom resource provider, allowing the creation, provisioning, and management of Elastic resources within Azure, with Elastic managing the SaaS application and associated accounts.

It provides a similar experience to the previous solution through a single-pane-of-glass visibility platform, with a unified billing experience integrated into your Azure bill and transparent access to Elastic solutions through single sign-on integration. Metrics and activity log ingestion are automatically configured, and installation of the custom  Elastic agents can be automated for your virtual machines.

More information is available at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/partnersolutions/elastic/create.

Azure Native Logz.io

Azure Native Logz.io is a cloud-native observability platform that combines the best open-source tools – OpenSearch, OpenTelemetry, and Prometheus – in a unified solution. Logz.io provides advanced log management, metrics monitoring, and tracing capabilities, helping organizations achieve comprehensive observability across their Azure environments. With seamless integration and powerful analytics, Azure Native Logz.io enhances your ability to monitor and troubleshoot applications and infrastructure.

Logz.io’s integration with Azure simplifies the deployment and management of observability tools. It is also provided as a SaaS application through the Azure Marketplace, which centralizes log, metric, and trace analytics. You can now provision the Logz.io resources through a custom resource provider that creates, provisions, and manages Logz.io resources through the Azure portal. Logz.io runs the SaaS, and Azure provides the interface to manage the resources.

Azure Native Logz.io empowers organizations to enhance their observability strategy, ensuring the reliability and performance of their applications and infrastructure through integrated log, metric, and trace management.

More information is available at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/partnersolutions/logzio/create.

Azure Native Dynatrace

Azure Native Dynatrace is a comprehensive observability platform designed to provide deep insights into the performance and health of your Azure applications and infrastructure. Dynatrace leverages artificial intelligence and automation to deliver precise answers, helping organizations optimize their operations and improve user experiences. With seamless Azure integration, Dynatrace offers monitoring capabilities across cloud and hybrid environments.

Dynatrace’s integration with Azure enables the automatic discovery and monitoring of Azure resources, offering a rich set of features such as AI-driven monitoring, using AI to automatically detect anomalies, identify root causes, and predict potential issues, or full stack observability that monitors the entire stack, from infrastructure to applications, in real-time.

Azure Native Dynatrace provides the same key benefits discussed in the previous solutions related to integration, billing, and automation of agent deployment and information collection.

More information is available at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/partnersolutions/dynatrace/dynatrace-create.

Azure Native New Relic

Azure Native New Relic is a powerful observability platform that offers comprehensive monitoring and analytics capabilities for your Azure applications and infrastructure. Designed to provide real-time visibility and actionable insights, New Relic integrates seamlessly with Azure, enabling organizations to monitor the performance and health of their environments with precision. By leveraging Azure Native New Relic, you can optimize application performance, enhance user experiences, and ensure operational excellence.

New Relic’s integration with Azure allows effortless monitoring of Azure resources, featuring continuous monitoring of applications and infrastructure for real-time insights, powerful analytics to gain a deeper understanding of performance metrics and user behavior, custom dashboards to visualize key performance indicators and trends, and distributed tracing to track and analyze end-to-end transactions across distributed systems, helping you to identify performance bottlenecks.

Adopting Azure Native New Relic provides the same key benefits discussed in the previous solutions related to integration, billing, and automation of agent deployment and information collection.

You can learn more i nformation at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ partner-solutions/new-relic/new-relic-create.

Additional third-party services for integration

In addition to Azure Native ISV services, numerous third-party services also offer robust integration capabilities with Azure Monitor. These integrations extend the functionality of Azure Monitor, providing specialized features and advanced analytics that enhance your observability strategy. Leveraging these third-party services allows organizations to tailor their monitoring and security solutions to meet specific business needs, ensuring comprehensive visibility and control over their Azure environments.

Those third-party services are as follows:

• IBM QRadar is a leading Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution that helps organizations detect and respond to security threats. Integrating QRadar with Azure Monitor allows you to centralize security event data from your Azure environment and gain deeper insights into potential security incidents. You can read more about it at https:// www.ibm.com/docs/en/qsip/7.5?topic=extensions-azure.
• Splunk is a powerful platform for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated data. Integrating Splunk with Azure Monitor enables you to collect, analyze, and visualize data from your Azure resources, enhancing your ability to monitor performance and detect issues. More information about this is available at https://splunk.github.io/splunkadd-on-for-microsoft-cloud-services/.
• Sumo Logic is a cloud-native, continuous intelligence platform for log management and analytics. Integrating Sumo Logic with Azure Monitor allows you to aggregate, monitor, and analyze log and metric data from your Azure resources, improving operational and security insights. More information i s available at https://help.sumologic.com/docs/ send-data/collect-from-other-data-sources/azure-monitoring/.
• ArcSight is a leading SIEM solution that provides advanced threat detection and response capabilities. Integrating ArcSight with Azure Monitor allows you to centralize security event data and gain actionable insights to protect your Azure environment. Read more about it at  https://www.microfocus.com/documentation/arcsight/arcsightsmartconnectors/#gsc.tab=0.
• Syslog servers are a critical component of many IT infrastructures, providing centralized logging for network devices, servers, and applications. Integrating Syslog servers with Azure Monitor allows you to collect, store, and analyze Syslog data from your Azure environment, improving visibility and operational efficiency. Further information is available at https://learn. microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/agents/data-collectionsyslog.

Conclusion

Azure Native ISV services and third-party integrations provide organizations with a diverse set of tools to optimize observability, enhance operational efficiency, and address unique monitoring challenges. By leveraging these solutions, businesses can achieve comprehensive visibility across their Azure environments, enabling proactive management, improved performance, and robust security. Whether it's integrating Datadog for real-time analytics, Elastic for advanced search capabilities, or New Relic for deep performance insights, these services empower organizations to tailor their monitoring strategies and unlock the full potential of Azure.

Author Bio

José Ángel Fernández has worked as a Microsoft Specialist and Cloud Solution Architect, specializing in advanced cloud migrations, with extensive technical expertise and a deep understanding of Azure solutions. He has been focused on the cloud for the last 11 years at Microsoft, starting at the same time virtual machines reached general availability and Azure Monitor was not yet a product.
José Ángel graduated with a degree in telecommunications engineering from the Technical University of Madrid in 2013. He later earned a degree in big data analytics from the Graduate School of Engineering and Basic Sciences of Charles III University of Madrid in 2020.
He resides in Madrid, Spain with his wife, his three-year-old child, and an adopted black cat that has never brought him bad luck.

Manuel Lázaro Ramírez is a Microsoft Cloud Solution Architect with a wide technical breadth and deep understanding of Azure solutions. He has been focused on designing and implementing cloud architectures in different industries for the last 10 years.
Manuel graduated with a degree in pure and applied mathematics from Complutense University of Madrid in 2013 and later earned a master’s degree in pure and applied mathematics from Complutense University of Madrid in 2014.
He resides in Madrid, Spain, with his wife, and his passion is developing code with their friends and working and solving real-world business problems with cloud technology to deliver real value.