What is the purpose of Azure Monitor?

Azure Monitor is Microsoft's comprehensive monitoring and observability platform that helps organizations collect, analyze, visualize, and respond to telemetry data from Azure resources, applications, virtual machines, containers, networks, and on-premises environments. Its primary purpose is to ensure that applications and infrastructure remain healthy, available, secure, and high-performing. Azure Monitor collects different types of data, including: Metrics Logs Performance counters Application telemetry Activity logs Resource diagnostics This information helps administrators and developers detect issues before they impact users. Azure Monitor works closely with services such as: Application Insights Log Analytics Azure Alerts Azure Dashboards Azure Automation For example, if CPU utilization exceeds 90% or an application starts returning excessive errors, Azure Monitor can automatically generate alerts, trigger automation workflows, or notify administrators. Major capabilities include: Real-time performance monitoring Infrastructure health monitoring Application performance management (APM) Log analytics Custom dashboards Intelligent alerting Root cause analysis Capacity planning Security monitoring By providing complete visibility into cloud resources, Azure Monitor enables organizations to reduce downtime, improve performance, optimize costs, and maintain service reliability.