📌 Introduction
Effective platform monitoring is more than just knowing when something goes down—it’s about predicting failure, proactively optimizing performance, and maintaining reliability at scale. With complex cloud-native applications running on Azure and Kubernetes, integrating logging and telemetry tools such as Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Prometheus, and Grafana becomes mission-critical.
This blog walks you through how I design an integrated telemetry stack for real-time observability across cloud platforms, with actionable insights and automated responses.
🧩 Why Unified Telemetry Matters
When logs, metrics, and traces are siloed:
You lose context
Root cause analysis is slow
Cross-team collaboration suffers
A unified strategy helps you:
Correlate data across layers (infra → app → network)
Reduce Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)
Improve SLAs and customer trust
🏗️ Architecture Overview
My typical logging and telemetry integration on Azure includes:
Azure Monitor: Native metrics, activity logs
Log Analytics Workspace: Query engine and centralized log storage
Prometheus: Kubernetes and container metrics
Grafana: Unified dashboard with multi-source visualizations
Azure Application Insights: Tracing, exceptions, dependency calls
🔍 Step-by-Step Integration Strategy
1️⃣ Azure Monitor + Log Analytics
Enable diagnostic settings on all Azure resources (VMs, App Services, SQL, etc.)
Route logs and metrics to:
Log Analytics Workspace for querying via Kusto Query Language (KQL)
Azure Storage for long-term archiving
Event Hub for streaming to external tools like Splunk/ELK
Use Case:
Tracked abnormal CPU usage patterns across VM scale sets and auto-scaled them using alert-action groups.
2️⃣ Application Insights for Distributed Tracing
Added SDK to Node.js/.NET Core apps for:
End-to-end transaction tracing
Exception reporting
Custom events (e.g., cart abandoned, login failure)
Linked App Insights to Log Analytics for deep KQL queries
Use Case:
Identified slow DB calls within a microservice chain during peak load using dependency tracking.
3️⃣ Prometheus for Kubernetes (AKS)
Installed Prometheus operator in the AKS cluster using Helm
Configured:
Node exporter, kube-state-metrics, and custom app metrics
Retention policies for metric data
Secured access with Azure AD + RBAC
Use Case:
Monitored container memory leaks and horizontal pod autoscaling triggers using Prometheus metrics.
4️⃣ Grafana for Unified Dashboards
Connected Grafana to:
Azure Monitor via plugin
Prometheus as a data source
Log Analytics via Azure Data Explorer (ADX)
Created role-based dashboards for:
Dev teams (traces, build metrics)
SREs (infra health, pod restarts)
Executives (SLA uptime, service availability)
Use Case:
Visualized end-to-end latency and availability across multiple zones for a payment gateway application.
5️⃣ Alerting & Anomaly Detection
Configured alert rules in Azure Monitor using:
Static thresholds (e.g., disk > 85%)
Dynamic thresholds using ML-based insights
KQL-based queries for pattern detection
Alert channels:
Azure Action Groups (SMS, email, Logic Apps)
Webhook to PagerDuty or Slack
Integration with ServiceNow for auto-ticket creation
Bonus:
Logic Apps auto-remediated App Service issues by restarting the service on CPU spike alerts.
🛡️ Security & Governance
Enabled diagnostic logging for Key Vault, Firewall, and NSGs
Enforced resource consistency with Azure Policy (ensuring all resources send telemetry to Log Analytics)
Monitored audit trails and Just-in-Time VM access
🚀 Benefits Achieved
MetricBeforeAfter Integration
Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)~45 minutes<5 minutes
Mean Time to Resolution~90 minutes~20–25 minutes
Alert noise ratioHighReduced by 60%
SLA compliance92%>99.5%
🔚 Conclusion
Monitoring doesn’t stop at collecting logs and metrics—it’s about creating a seamless system of observability, context, and response. By integrating Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Prometheus, and Grafana, you build a scalable, secure, and proactive telemetry system that drives uptime, reliability, and trust.
Ready to elevate your platform visibility?
