Lexicon · Guide
Azure monitoring built to keep telemetry in your own tenant
What Azure monitoring covers, why Log Analytics costs climb faster than the estate they watch, and what changes when the platform runs in your tenant.
On this page
Definition
Azure monitoring is the practice of collecting and reading metrics, logs and traces from the Azure services your applications run on, from virtual machines and AKS clusters through to App Service, Functions and managed databases, so you can tell whether the platform and the applications on it are healthy. It overlaps with infrastructure monitoring, and for most teams it starts with Azure Monitor and the Log Analytics workspace underneath it, which is also where the cost question turns up for the first time.
Your Azure monitoring bill grows faster than the estate it is meant to explain, and finance wants to know why. Most platforms collect telemetry inside your subscription, ship it somewhere else to be stored, then charge you again for bytes you already paid to generate and to move. This guide covers why that happens, and what changes when the platform runs inside the tenant instead.
Related terms
- BYOCBYOC, Bring Your Own Cloud, is a deployment model where a vendor's software runs inside the customer's own cloud account, operated by the vendor but living on infrastructure the customer owns.
- Data residencyData residency is the question of where data physically lives: which country or region stores it, and where it is processed along the way.
- Egress costsEgress costs are the fees cloud providers charge for data leaving their network, priced per gigabyte and varying by destination.
- Infrastructure monitoringInfrastructure monitoring is the practice of tracking the health, performance, and capacity of the layer applications run on: hosts, virtual machines, containers, Kubernetes clusters, and managed cloud services.
- OpenTelemetryOpenTelemetry is an open source framework for generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry: the logs, metrics, and traces that describe how software behaves in production.
- SamplingSampling is the practice of keeping only a subset of telemetry, usually traces, so that volume and cost stay manageable.