Tools for Managing, Monitoring and Deploying Resources on Azure

Azure Portal

Azure portal is a great way to manage and monitor our resources, this approach is fine and has no issues in the long run, but there are better ways to manage our resources using some advanced CLI Tools, this way is helpful when we have more than a few hundreds or thousands of resources.

Scripting Languages

Azure Supports Powershell, CLI/Bash and cloud-shell(PowerShell), using these tools we can get information on our resources as a JSON Response.

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az functionapp list # To list azure functions
az webapp list # To list azure webapps

Using these tools we can automate a particular workflow, for eg we always create a VM of a certain configuration with certain settings, while on the Portal it takes us a few dozen mouse clicks, we can automate this routine task using the CLI tools.

Examples

Here is an example to create a resource group via the command line

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az group create --name newrg --location eastus

upon running this command line, we will receive a JSON response on the terminal, if the provisioningState is Succeeded then our resource group is created.

Here is another example to create a Virtual Machine

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az vm create --resource-group newrg --name testvm --image Win2019Datacenter --public-ip-sku Standard --admin-username testuser

the CLI will then prompt us for a password for the admin user, and then the VM will be created shortly.

we can open the ports of the VM using this command

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az vm open-port --port 80 --resource-group newrg --name testvm

Azure Arc

Azure Arc is a tool offered by Azure to monitor and manage our resources that are running on-prem or on other cloud providers, it is like a consolidated dashboard for all our resources.

Azure Resource Manager (ARM)

All resources made via Portal, CLI tools and API endpoints, all go through the Azure Resource Manager where an ARM template is created, the ARM template is a JSON file where the

Azure Advisor

The Azure Advisor is a tool that notifies us about various things about our resources such as if we are not utilizing the VM’s resources, and also notifies us about the security of our resources.

Azure Service Health

Azure Service Health gives us the status of Azure’s Environment, if we have resources in a particular region and Azure has some downtime issues in the same region, we can receive notifications on our mobile, or email

Azure Monitor

This section on the azure portal helps us to monitor all our resources on Azure, and this section has been improving overtime. We can set alerts to notify us of some events, and pin a chart to our dashboard for easy and quick access. We can also download the diagnostic data from the portal, this offers us particular options for what needs to be recorded. All the log data can also be viewed from Azure Analytics Workspace, where we can view the logs from all resources in one consolidated console. Using a special Query Language we can perform operations to filter and sort the log data