- Configure and interpret metrics
- Configure Azure Monitor Logs
- Query and analyze logs
- Set up alerts and actions
- Configure monitoring of VMs, storage accounts, and networks by using VM insights
Azure Monitor captures logs and metrics telemetry data, enabling you to analyze and identify potential issues.
- Configure Azure Monitor to capture data for Azure services, resources, and apps.
- An alert consists of alert rules that mix the settings and conditions you want to monitor:
- Conditions to match
- Signals to gather from your resources
- Resources you wish to monitor
- An alert rule specifies action groups to fulfill responsive steps when an alert is triggered - sending notifications to admins.
Azure Monitor can be accessed from the Azure portal.
Alert types:
- Metric alerts
- Log alerts
- Activity log events
- Smart detection alerts
Alert states:
- New: open and not in review
- This is the only state that is set by the system, the other changes must be made by an admin.
- Acknowledged: in review, work is in progress
- Closed: issue is complete
Stateless alerts
- Triggered each time an alert rule condition matches the data analyzed, even if the same alert exists.
Stateful alerts
- Triggered when rule conditions match the data and the same alert does not exist.
- Create an Azure Recovery Services vault
- Create an Azure Backup vault
- Create and configure backup policy
- Perform backup and restore operations by using Azure Backup
- Configure Azure Site Recovery for Azure resources
- Perform failover to a secondary region by using Azure Site Recovery
- Configure and review backup reports
This service can be used to backup, protect, and restore data in Microsoft's cloud. It replaces any on-prem backup solution with a solution in the cloud, providing reliability, security, and provides cost benefits.
- Agents are available to download and deploy. The agent you choose will depend on what you want to protect.
- All agents, regardless of data residing on-prem or in the cloud, can be used to backup to a Recovery Services vault.
Benefits of using Azure Backup include:
- Keeping data secure using an encryption passphrase locally.
- Note: this passphrase is never transmitted or stored in Azure
- Unlimited data transfer without added fees. Data isn't limited inbound or outbound (data transferred from a Recovery Services vault during a restore).
- Note: initial backups offline using the import/export feature for large amounts of data will be associated with a cost for inbound data.
- App-consistent backups, meaning a recovery point has all data needed to restore the backup. This ensures there isn't a need for additional fixes to restore your data, saving you time getting back to a running state.
- Automatic storage management eliminates the need to implement on-prem storage for hybrid environments. Azure Backup will handle the allocation and manage the storage, and only requires orgs to pay for what they use.
- Offload on-prem backups to the cloud without any complex backup solutions being needed.
- Short term and long term data retention as there is no limit to the timeframe data can stay in the vault. However, Azure Backup does have a limit of 9,999 recovery points/protected instance.
- Various replication types for storage and high availability.
- Geo-redundant storage (GRS): this is the default and recommended to use for replication. It replicates the data to another, secondary region far away.
- Note: this method is more expensive than LRS, however, it also offers a higher level of durability in the event of a regional outage.
- Locally redundant storage (LRS): data will be replicated 3 times in a storage scale unit within a datacenter. This method is less expensive than GRS and protects against hardware failures that occur within the same datacenter the data is stored in.
- Note: ALL copies of the data will exist within the same region.
- Geo-redundant storage (GRS): this is the default and recommended to use for replication. It replicates the data to another, secondary region far away.
- Disaster recovery as on-prem data backups are stored in the cloud.
- Secure storage as you're provided the ability to encrypt data before backing up to the cloud.
When Azure Backup is configured, the data gets stored inside a Recovery Services vault.
- Note: the data is usually copies of configuration settings for workstations, servers, VMs, or workloads.
Azure services that can be backed up:
- VMs (both Windows and Linux)
- Azure SQL databases
- And others
On-prem services that can be backed up:
- Windows server
- System Center DPM
- Azure Backup server
- And others
Recovery Services vaults allow you to organize backup data while reducing the management overhead needed.
- Note: it can help track, audit, manage, and organize multiple servers from a centralize dashboard.
The following information is needed to create a vault:
- Subscription
- Resource group
- Vault name
- Region
- Important: you cannot backup VMs that are in different regions.
- Additionally, the vault will be created by default with georedundant storage. Change this before backing up data to optimize cost
Provides a unified management experience within Azure, allowing companies to monitor, govern, analyze, and operate backups at scale.
Benefits of Backup Center include:
- Efficiently managing backups across multiple workload types, subscriptions, regions, tenants, and vaults.
- Backup center uses Workbooks from Azure Monitor/Monitor Logs (Log Analytics) to provide detailed reports on your backups.
- Admins can filter views by specifc datasource properties like the datasource subscription, resource group, and tag(s).
- Support is available in Azure VM backup (SQL, SAP HANA), Azure files backup, Blob storage backup, and Azure managed disks backup, as well as Azure database for postgreSQL server backup.
- Backup center uses the Azure Policy to govern backups.
- Community resources can also be discovered within Backup center.