Azure Infrastructure: Monitoring RedCap Resources

• Azure monitor & Azure Application Insights are both powerful monitoring solutions that have their own sets of capabilities and focus areas.
• While the metrics they monitor overlap, Application insight is specially designed for application performance monitoring, whereas Azure monitor provides broader infrastructure Platform level monitoring.
• It is to be noted that application Insights is a feature Azure monitor.
• Application insights focuses primarily on application-level telemetry data.

Cost of monitoring:

• For Application Insights, you are charged based on the volume of telemetry data ingested.
• i.e., Metrics, traces, exceptions & custom event sent by applications.
• In Applications Insights, longer retention periods may result in higher storage costs. Data storage is charged based on the amount of data retained beyond the free tier.
• Azure Monitor offers basic monitoring capabilities for Azure resources at no additional cost.
  o Every subscription comes with a free basic monitoring.

App Services

• Application hosted within Azure’s App Services can be monitored using Application Insights.
• Insights also monitors various metrics together with telemetry data from Azure Web Apps to provide insights into application performance, availability, and usage.
  Application Insights Metrics:

Request Count

• Request Count: Number of HTTP requests processed by the web app.
• Request Time: Average time taken to process HHTP request.

Performance Metrics:

• Server Response Time: Time taken by the server to generate a response to client requests.
• Client-Side Performance: Metrics related to client-side performance, such as page load time & network latency.
• Dependency Calls: Metrics related to calls to external dependencies such as database queries, HTTP call.

User Interaction Metrics:

• User Sessions: Number of User Sessions and active users interacting with the web app.
• User Flows: Visualization of User journeys & path though webapp.
• User retention: Metrics related to user engagement, retention rates & session durations.
  Exception Tracking:
• Exception Count: Number of exception and errors thrown by application
  Free Azure Monitor Metrices:
• HTTP server Response Time: Measures the time taken to process HTTP requests Served by the App services.
• HTTP Server Errors: Tracks the number of HTTP Server errors returned by the app services.
• CPU Percentage: Monitors the CPU utilization of the app service instance.
  Azure MySQL Database
• In addition to app services, Application insight can also be used to monitor Azure MySQL.
• Application Insight can be used to monitor database performance, server, and query performance.
  Application Insights Metrics:
  Performance Metric:
• Query Execution Time: Measures the time taken to execute SQL queries on the database.
• Database Throughput: Measures the number of transportations processed per unit of time.
• Slow Queries: Identifies and logs SQL queries with long execution times.
• Query Execution Plans: Provides insights into the execution plans of SQL queries, helping to optimize query performance.
• Index utilization: Table and index fragmentation tells us when to rebuild or reorganize the index.
  Error and Exception Monitoring:
• Query Errors: Tracks errors and exceptions encountered during SQL Query Execution
• Database Timeout Errors: Monitors timeouts during database operations
• Deadlocks: Detects & logs deadlocks that occur between transactions
  Connection Monitoring:
• Connection Pool Usage: Monitors the utilization of database connection pools within the application.
• Connection errors: Tracks errors related to failed database connections or connectivity issues.
  Free Azure Monitor Metrices:
• CPU Usage, Memory Utilization, Storage utilization, connection counts, query Execution Time & error counts.
  Resource Utilization Metrics:
• CPU utilization: Monitors CPU usage of the database server.
• Memory Utilization: Tracks the memory consumption of the Database server.
• Storage Utilization: Measure the amount of storage used by the database.

Azure Application Gateway:

• Application Insights can be used to monitor the Azure App gateway load balancer.
  Application Insight Metrics:
• End-To-End Request Tracing:
  o Trace requests as they flow through the entire application stack including the azure application gateway, backend services & client-side components.
• User session & behavior Analytics:
  • Tracks user sessions and interaction with the application served through the application gateway.
• Live Metrics Stream:
  • View real time telemetry data such as Request rates, response times, error rates and a livestream dashboard.
    Free Azure Monitor Metrices:
• Throughput:
  • Incoming and outgoing data throughput: Measures the amount of network traffic processing by the application gateway.
• Request Count: Tracks the number of requests received by the application gateway.
• HTTP status Codes: Monitors the distribution of HTTP status codes returned by app gateway i.e., 200, 300, 400 etc.
• Backend Health: Tracks the number of unhealthy & healthy Backend instance.

Azure Storage Account:

Application Insight Metrices

• Storage Transactions:
  • Number of reads & write operations performed on Azure blob storage, tables & queues.
• Storage latency:
  • Avg, max, min latency for read & write transactions to Azure storage.
• Blob metrices.
  • Number of Blobs accessed, created, or modified.
• Blob storage Analytics:
  • Metrics for blob storage analytics, including storage capacity, request statistics and service latency.
  • Logging metrics for blob storage access & operations.
• Custom metrics & logs:
  • Log data from Azure storage diagnostics logs including detailed information about storage operations, errors & access patterns.
    Free Azure Monitor Metrices:
• Ingres/Egres metrics:
  • Total incoming & outgoing Data volumes: tracks the amount of data transferred to and from Azure storage accounts.
  • Ingress & egress data rate.
• Storage Transactions:
  • Number of reads & write operations performed on Azure blob storage, tables & queues.