Imagine if you could get a dynamic, end-to-end view of your IT environment, and respond to issues as they arise. You could see how your applications, services, and workloads are connected, and how your servers interact with the networks. You could see connections turn red if they fail, view cascading alerts, and see rogue clients that could be causing problems. Not only that, but with just a few clicks you could fix the issue, and see the red alerts go away. Bringing together your data from workloads, applications, and networks help you start to see the big picture. However, when you apply machine learning and crowd-sourced knowledge from around the globe, suddenly you can visualize and act on your data in a way that you never have before.

To help get this visibility into your cloud and on-premises environment and make it actionable, we are introducing today new monitoring and diagnostics capabilities in Azure:

• Map out process and server dependencies with Service Map, a new technology in Azure Insight & Analytics, to make it easier to troubleshoot and plan ahead for future changes or migrations.
• Use DNS Analytics, a new solution in Azure Insight & Analytics, to help you visualize real-time security, performance, and operations-related data for your DNS servers.
• Use the Smart Diagnostics functionality in Azure Application Insights to diagnose sudden changes in the performance or usage of your web application.

In addition, expanded support for Linux has been added to monitoring tools and capabilities in Azure Automation & Control, including Linux patching and Linux file change tracking. You can also now ingest custom logs into Azure Application Insights for more powerful data correlations and analytics.

Visualize dependencies in your environment

A big part of what makes you successful is how quickly you can resolve issues. We take the hard part out of data collection and insights, so you can analyze the issues and resolve them more quickly. The Service Map technology, now generally available, allows you to automatically discover and build a common reference map of dependencies across servers, processes, and 3rd party services, in real-time. This helps you to isolate problems and accelerate root-cause analysis, by visualizing process and server dependencies. In the same dashboard, you can see prioritized alerts, recent changes, notable security issues, and system updates that are due.

In addition, you can use this new capability to make sure nothing is left behind during migrations with the help of the detailed process and server inventory, or identify servers that need to be decommissioned. InSpark uses Service Map to help customer plan and execute migrations to Azure. “Before Service Map, we had to rely on customers to provide information about their servers’ dependencies, and that information was error prone in and incomplete,” says Maarten Goet, Managing Partner. “Now, with Service Map, we immediately see all of their dependencies and we can build an accurate plan for moving business services into Azure.”

See across network devices

Modern businesses are powered by apps that have fast, reliable and secure network connections. Domain Name System (DNS) server is a core component of an organization’s IT infrastructure, that enables such network connections. So, the visibility into operations, performance, and audit of DNS servers is critical for businesses.

You can use DNS Analytics, a solution now in public preview in Azure Insight & Analytics, to get visibility into your entire DNS infrastructure. This solution helps you visualize real-time security, performance, and operations-related information of your DNS servers through real-time dashboard views. You can drill-down into the dashboard to gain granular details on the state of your DNS infrastructure, create alerts, and remediate DNS server issues. “DNS Analytics provided us with the in-depth information I have been missing,” says Marius Sandbu, cloud architect for Evry, “both to be able to troubleshoot DNS registrations from clients and servers, but also to detect traffic to malware domains.”

Diagnose application issues on the spot

You can now diagnose sudden changes in your web app’s performance or usage with a single click, powered by Machine Learning algorithms in Azure Application Insights Analytics. The Smart Diagnostics feature is available whenever you create or render a time chart. Anywhere it finds an unusual change from the trend of your results, such as a spike or a dip, it identifies a pattern of dimensions that might explain the change. This helps you diagnose the problem quickly. Smart Diagnostics can successfully identify a pattern of property values associated with a change, and highlight the difference between results with and without that pattern, essentially suggesting the most probable root cause leading to an anomaly.

Get started today

Azure management and security services help you to gain greater visibility into your environment with advanced data analysis and visualization, and make it easy to turn insights into action. Learn more about the capabilities of Azure Insight & Analytics and Azure Application Insights, and how they can help you reduce complexity for a hybrid cloud environment.