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Multicloud monitoring with Azure Monitor

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In addition to monitoring services and application in Azure, Azure Monitor can provide complete monitoring for your resources and applications running in other clouds including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This article describes features of Azure Monitor that allow you to provide complete monitoring across your AWS and GCP environments.

Virtual machines

Azure Arc-enabled servers provide a consistent experience between both Azure virtual machines and your AWS EC2 or GCP VM instances. This includes using standard Azure constructs such as Azure Policy and applying tags. The Azure Monitor agent collects telemetry from the client operating system of virtual machines regardless of their location, and you can use the same data collection rules that define your data collection across all of the virtual machines across your different cloud environments. If you use VM insights in Azure Monitor, you can view your hybrid machines right alongside your Azure machines and onboard them using identical methods.

If you use Defender for Cloud for security management and threat detection, then you can use auto provisioning to automate the deployment of the Azure Arc agent to your AWS EC2 and GCP VM instances.

Kubernetes

Managed Prometheus and Container insights in Azure Monitor use Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes to provide a consistent experience between both Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Kubernetes clusters in your AWS EKS or GCP GKE instances. You can view your hybrid clusters right alongside your Azure machines and onboard them using the same methods. This includes using standard Azure constructs such as Azure Policy and applying tags.

Use Prometheus remote write from your on-premises, AWS, or GCP clusters to send data to Azure managed service for Prometheus.

The Azure Monitor agent installed by Container insights collects telemetry from the client operating system of clusters regardless of their location. Use the same analysis tools, Managed Grafana and Container insights, to monitor clusters across your different cloud environments.

Applications

Applications hosted outside of Azure must be hard coded to send telemetry to Azure Monitor Application Insights using SDKs for supported languages. Annual code maintenance should be planned to upgrade the SDKs per Application Insights SDK support guidance.

  • If you use Grafana for visualization of monitoring data across your different clouds. use the Azure Monitor data source to include application log and metric data in your dashboards.
  • If you use Data Dog, use Azure integrations to include application log and metric data in your Data Dog UI.

Audit

In addition to monitoring the health of your cloud resources, you can consolidate auditing data from your AWS and GCP clouds into your Log Analytics workspace so that you can consolidate your analysis and reporting. This is best performed by Azure Sentinel which uses the same workspace as Azure Monitor and provides additional features for collecting and analyzing security and auditing data.

Use the following methods to ingest AWS service log data into Microsoft Sentinel.

Use the following methods to use a plugin to collect events, including pub/sub events, stored in GCP Cloud Storage, and then ingest into Log Analytics.

Custom data sources

Use the following methods to collect data from your cloud resources that doesn't fit into standard collection methods.

Automation

Azure Automation delivers cloud-based automation, operating system updates, and configuration services that support consistent management across your Azure and non-Azure environments. It includes process automation, configuration management, update management, shared capabilities, and heterogeneous features. Hybrid Runbook Worker enables automation runbooks to run directly on the non-Azure virtual machines against resources in the environment to manage those local resources.

Through Arc-enabled servers, Azure Automation provides a consistent deployment and management experience for your non-Azure machines. It enables integration with the Automation service using the VM extension framework to deploy the Hybrid Runbook Worker role, and simplify onboarding to Update Management and Change Tracking and Inventory.