Forum Discussion
Monitor Azure network components
Hi team,
Hope you're doing well.
Today, I need some advices to implement monitoring on network resources.
For one of my clients, I'm in charge of deploying the dedicated infrastructure foundation for each project.
This foundation is essentially composed of:
- A virtual network (VNET),
- One or more subnets (SNETs),
- A Route Table (RT) dedicated to a subnet,
- User Defined Routes (UDRs) associated with an RT,
This infrastructure foundation is consumed by the project, so it's imperative that we have a dashboard view to assess the health of each component.
To provide visual monitoring, I want to leverage Azure Monitor.
I therefore want to create a Network dashboard, where I can see the status of resources at a glance.
The problem is that the metrics currently offered by Azure Monitor for dashboard creation are quite limited, according to the official Microsoft documentation.
Here is the list of official Microsoft links for Azure resources that offer metrics:
- VNEt and subnets - Virtual Networks: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/reference/supported-metrics/microsoft-network-virtualnetworks-metrics
I also checked on Network Insights, and unfortunately, the solution don't support the mentioned components.
I know it's also possible to use workbooks to retrieve certain information.
Are there any native Azure solutions that provide visual monitoring of these resources?
Thank you for your help.
4 Replies
You can enable the available Diagnostic logs at each required component and send them to Log analytics workspace. Once the logs area available, we can create the custom dashboards using the KQL queries.
I completely agree with the poster here, this is something MS and Azure should have better solutions for!
I actually have an open-source project trying to address some of the issues here:
https://www.cloudnetdraw.com/
But that is only current network posture and if subnets have UDR or NSGs attached. Not all that is asked for in the post.Azure monitor offers below:
- Azure Network Watcher: This tool provides network monitoring, diagnostics, and logging capabilities. It includes features like Connection Monitor, which helps track network connectivity between Azure resources.
- Network Performance Monitor (NPM): It helps monitor network connectivity, latency, and packet loss across Azure and hybrid environments.
- Azure Monitor Workbooks: You can customize dashboards and pull in relevant network metrics.
- Azure Managed Grafana: Azure Managed Grafana integrates with Azure Monitor and can provide custom dashboards for network observability which providing advanced visualization.
- Network Observability Add-on for AKS: If your infrastructure includes Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), this add-on provides cluster-level networking metrics.
Thanks for your answer.
Unfortunately I already check these services and none of thus provide relevant metrics or logs to perform any visual monitoring.
As a Microsoft engineer said: "He never saw these services have issues"
Maybe but I would like to be sure that in case of incident, I can detect it through monitorng ;o)
