How to customize your Site24x7 Azure monitor

Given Azure's dynamic and growing ecosystem, manually tracking all resources, subscriptions, and services can be overwhelming. To effectively monitor and manage your Azure cloud infrastructure, Site24x7 lets you tailor your Azure monitor setup for maximum visibility.

Use case

If you're an enterprise that manages various Azure subscriptions and numerous resources, tracking all its resources and deciding where to begin can be challenging.

With Site24x7's Azure monitor customization, you can:

Automatically discover and add new subscriptions and resources for monitoring.
Simplify focus by including or excluding specific resources based on tags.
Set threshold profiles for the resources and receive alerts when the thresholds are breached.

This customization ensures your enterprise gains clear insights, minimizes manual effort, and optimizes cloud operations.

Customizing your Site24x7 Azure monitor

Customization can be done as soon as you set up your Azure monitor.

To customize, follow these steps to add a monitor, and once you have provided the required credentials, you will be redirected to the Site24x7 console to add a monitor.

Basic configurations

On the Add Azure Monitor page:

Provide a Display Name for identification purposes.
Set the Client Secret Expiry date.
Associate the monitor with existing or new Monitor Groups.
Under Azure Resource Filter:
- Select the subscriptions you want to monitor from the list of discovered Azure subscriptions in the Subscriptions drop-down menu.
- Toggle Auto-add New Subscriptions for Monitoring to Yes to automatically discover and add new subscriptions for monitoring.
- Select the resource groups to monitor from the Resource Groups drop-down menu.
- Toggle Auto-add New Resource Groups for Monitoring to Yes to automatically discover and add new resource groups for monitoring.
- Select the Azure service types you want to monitor from the Service/Resource Types drop-down.
  - By default, all subscriptions, resource groups, and supported service types in your Azure account will be selected for monitoring.

Discovery of new resources

Set the Discovery Interval to discover new resources in regular time intervals (ranging from 30 minutes to one day) using the drop-down.
Toggle Auto-discover New Resources to Enable to automatically discover and monitor any new resources in the upcoming discovery cycle.
If discovery is triggered by the user from Site24x7, new resources will be discovered irrespective of the preference provided here.

Inclusion and exclusion of Azure resources from monitoring

Include Azure resources based on Tags: Toggle between OR or AND based on your preference. Type the Key and the values to match the resources that you want to include for monitoring. You can add as many tags as you need by clicking the + icon near the Value tab. This option will include the matching resources from your Azure Account and add them for monitoring.
Exclude Azure resources based on Tags: Toggle between OR or AND based on your preference. Type the Key and also the values to match the resources that you want to exclude from monitoring. You can add as many as you need by clicking the + icon near the Value tab. This option will exclude the matching resources from your Azure Account and exclude them from monitoring.

Advanced configurations

Install the Server Monitoring Agent in VMs

While onboarding, you can choose to install the server monitoring agents in all your VMs with this one-click action.

Under the Advanced Configuration section:

Toggle Install the Server Monitoring Agent in VMs to Yes, to install the server monitoring extension in all the discovered virtual machines that match the filter given in the Install Agent in VMs Matching the RegEx field.

Note

You need a contributor role to auto-install the extension.

Notifications

Enable Receive Notifications for Azure Service Recommendations to get service recommendations from Site24x7 Azure monitoring and the updates on the latest releases.
Toggle Yes to Mark Stopped Virtual Machines as Maintenance to move the stopped Azure VMs into Site24x7's maintenance window.
Set Yes to Notify for the Exhaustion of Basic Monitor License Units to get alerts when you have exhausted your license units. Note that exhausting your license units will impact the addition of new resources.

Stop discovery after license exhaustion

You can also set Yes to Stop Rediscovery if the License Units have Exhausted so that the discovery will not happen after license exhaustion.

Grouping your resources

Auto create monitor groups: Set to Yes to automatically create monitor groups for simplifying resource management.
Group by Tags: Input the key and the regex value to group your Azure resources by tags.

Viewing your integrated server

Display Server Monitor After Integration: Enable this to view the server monitor after your VM is integrated. You can view your Server monitor by navigating to Server > Server Monitor > Servers tab and also in the respective VM Instances tab after integration.
Sync Display Name from Agent Configuration: For the integration-supported monitors, the server monitor name will be synchronized with the monitor name of the specific resource if this is toggled to Yes.

Note

The sync occurs only during the integration process and not during each service discovery or data collection.

Auto-assign Threshold Profile

Overwrite Existing Threshold Profiles: Switch the toggle to Yes to apply the modified threshold profile to existing monitors of the service. Alternatively, you can retain the existing setting (No) and apply the modified default threshold profile to the resources that are yet to be added for monitoring.
Click on the drop-down near Configure Default Threshold Profiles for the Selected Services, and select the service type for which you want to configure the preferred threshold profile. Create a new threshold profile or choose an existing one, which will be applied to the resources based on the above setting.

Resource Termination Settings

Under Resource Termination Settings:

Toggle Yes to Mute Resource Termination Alerts if you don't want to receive alerts when the terminated resources are automatically suspended or deleted from Site24x7.
Toggle Yes to Monitor Terminated Resources to ensure monitoring continues for terminated resources. The monitor will be labeled Down, and the polling will continue until manually suspended.
Toggle Yes to Automatically Remove Terminated Resources from monitoring. You can also choose to define a specific time period (in days) to determine how long the terminated resources should be retained in the Site24x7 web console before being permanently deleted.
- If this field is set to Yes: The monitored resource will move to the deleted state.
- If this field is set to No: The monitored resource will move to the suspended state for the stipulated time period.
Set the time duration for Remove Terminated Resources After so that you can determine how long (in days) the terminated resources should be retained in the Site24x7 web console before permanent deletion.

Guidance Report Configuration

Set Yes to Enable all Best Practice Checks and Use Default Baselines and get recommended of the best practice recommendations for your resources. Setting it to No will list all the available best practices. You can select the practices and configure baselines, if applicable.

Configuring Azure Activity Log Collection

Under Activity Logs Collection Configuration, enable Activity Logs Collection, set the Log Collection Interval, and select the Log Categories to be collected.

Configuration Profiles

Threshold and Availability: Choose the desired Threshold and Availability Profile so that the alarms engine can decide if a specific resource has to be declared as critical or down. Also ensure that you configure downtime rules to reduce false alerts.

Notification Profiles, User Groups, and Tags

Select existing Notification Profiles, User Groups, Site24x7 Tags, or add new ones. This will apply to the resources that are added in the upcoming discovery. These will be applied to all the associated resource monitors too. For each resource, a Site24x7 Azure tag consisting of Resource Group, Location, Subscription, and Resource Type will be created. You can also integrate Site24x7 alarms with your preferred third-party service.

The following is the tag format:

subscription: {subscription_name}
resourceGroup: {resourcegroup_name}
location: {location}
serviceType: {monitortype}

Automatically create monitor groups

Under the Advanced settings, if the Auto-create monitor group is set to Yes and the tag key and value/value RegEx is given, a system-generated monitor group will be created along with the subgroups for each tag key-value pair.

After setting the preferred configurations, click Discover Azure Resources to start monitoring.

After customizing the Azure monitor, it takes up to 30 minutes to discover your preferred Azure resources.