Azure Monitor is a comprehensive monitoring service provided by Microsoft for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry data from both on-premises and cloud environments. It enables organizations to understand the performance and health of their applications and infrastructure by providing powerful analytics tools, rich visualizations, and integrations with various systems. Azure Monitor collects data from logs, metrics, and traces, allowing businesses to gain insights into their operations, resolve issues proactively, and optimize performance. By integrating Azure Monitor with Frends iPaaS, businesses can create advanced workflows to ensure timely actions based on activity data or insights obtained from the monitoring system.

Business use cases

Application performance monitoring and alerting

Azure Monitor captures metrics and logs from various infrastructure and applications. When integrated with Frends, these metrics can trigger automated workflows when thresholds are breached. For example, if CPU usage on an application server exceeds a specific limit, Frends can initiate a workflow to alert administrators via email or messaging platforms or even spin up additional resources automatically to stabilize the system.

Log analysis and anomaly detection

Using Azure Monitor, businesses can aggregate logs from multiple sources for deep analysis. Frends can complement this by orchestrating workflows that process anomalies or trigger predefined actions. For instance, if log analysis detects a security breach, Frends can initiate workflows to alert the security team, block potential malicious IP addresses, or log the event in security information and event management (SIEM) tools.

Dashboard creation and report automation

Azure Monitor provides rich visualization tools, such as dashboards. Frends adds value by automating the creation and distribution of monitoring reports. Organizations can define workflows to query monitoring data from Azure Monitor and generate periodic reports, which are then sent to stakeholders via email or stored in shared Office365 repositories.

Integration with third-party IT Service Management (ITSM) tools

Azure Monitor can integrate with ITSM tools like ServiceNow. By leveraging Frends, businesses can automate the process of creating support tickets in ITSM platforms whenever an issue or performance degradation is detected. Frends ensures the workflows also include adding relevant context derived from monitoring data to make issue resolution faster.

Capacity management and resource scaling

Azure Monitor offers insights into resource usage and demands. Frends can use these insights to automate workflows that dynamically allocate resources across cloud or hybrid environments. For example, when Azure Monitor detects low resource usage, Frends can initiate cost-saving workflows to shut down idle instances, or conversely, scale resources during high traffic periods.

SLA compliance monitoring

Organizations monitor Service Level Agreements (SLAs) through Azure Monitor to ensure that services maintain an acceptable level of performance. Frends supports this by orchestrating workflows that alert teams when SLA breaches are imminent and automating follow-up actions such as notifying the responsible teams or initiating troubleshooting procedures.