Azure Monitor and Serverless360 Comparison
Tags: azure, serverless
Published: 2020-09-09 09:24:32

## Do you have the following questions when considering Serverless360 as a monitoring solution for your Azure Serverless Applications?


* Why should I use Serverless360 when the Azure portal already has Azure Monitor?
* How different is Serverless360 from Azure Monitor?

Below are the strong reasons why Serverless360 should be chosen over Azure Monitor.
### 1. Monitor Azure Serverless Applications
In real-time Azure Serverless services are put together to build orchestrations that solve critical business needs. What is required is a monitoring solution for these applications. What one can find in the Azure portal is Azure Monitor, a monitoring solution for an Azure entity. Serverless360 complements the Azure portal by providing the much-needed monitoring for serverless applications.
### 2. Consolidated Report
What is required is a consolidated report on the status of all the Azure entities that participate in the business application. It is really challenging to correlate the reports on every entity from the Azure monitor. Serverless360 provides a consolidated report on all the Azure entities that participate in the business solution which makes it easy to infer.
### 3. Monitor on Multiple Metrics
Restriction with Azure Monitor is that every alert rule is strongly tied to an entity and only a couple of metrics can be configured to be monitored. Serverless360 data monitoring solution enables monitoring multiple entities on an extensive list of metrics enabling monitoring the Serverless applications at various perspectives like availability, reliability, performance, and so on.
### 4. Much More than Metrics Monitoring
Business needs would demand monitoring solution way beyond entity metrics, like Status and properties of the entities, and detect failures in orchestrations. Serverless360 offers a variety of monitors to fulfill real-time needs like monitoring status of a Relay, Dead Lettered Message count in Service Bus Queue/Topic Subscription, Incoming messages to an Event Hub partition, and detecting failures in Logic Apps, Azure Functions 1.X, and API endpoints.
### 5. Not just a Monitoring Tool
Serverless360 is not just a metric based monitoring tool, it has got outbox management solutions to help achieve critical tasks at ease. Manage entity properties, define Topic subscription rules, import Service Bus, Event Hubs and Relays from one namespace to another, manage shared access policies, process messages in Service Bus, Storage Queues, and Event Grid Subscriptions, and do much more.
### 6. Support to Notification Channels
Serverless360 supports a wide range of Notification channels like Pager Duty, Slack, OMS, Microsoft Teams along with Webhook and email channels that are supported by Azure Monitor.

This article would substantiate the above points with technical proofs and provide the reader clarity on why to choose Serverless360 over Azure Monitor for consolidated monitoring on Azure Serverless Applications.

## Quick Overview

### What are these tools?
Serverless360 is One platform for Azure Serverless monitoring and management. In a real-time scenario, the integrated cloud applications are not built with a single technology stack, it typically involves multiple Azure Services. Currently, Azure Portal is designed more on vertical technology silos and it's difficult to visualize and manage such connected solutions. Serverless360 is one tool that you can depend on for Azure Serverless monitoring and management from one place. Serverless360 is crafted with capabilities to complement the Azure Portal.

Azure Monitor maximizes the availability and performance of your applications by delivering a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your cloud and on-premises environments. It helps you understand how your applications are performing and proactively identifies issues affecting them and the resources they depend on.

### For whom are these of use?
Serverless360 eases out achieving real-time critical tasks in managing Serverless Applications with its management capabilities, which would be of use to the Azure Developers, Testers, and DevOps teams.

Monitoring solutions offered at the Application level would let the Support, DevOps team to access and monitor Serverless applications from various perspectives.

Azure Monitor is also for Azure Developers, Testers and DevOps teams, and Support teams.

### What do they offer in a nutshell?
Extensive Toolset to manage and variety of monitors to offer Consolidated monitoring on Composite Applications which represent the business solution.

It is a Metrics based monitoring whenever there is a violation of configured condition It will alert through the action group.

### How much do they cost?
The pricing of the Serverless360 SaaS version depends on the number of entities associated and the activities configured.
The number of Monitors does not influence Serverless360 pricing. A user can create as many numbers of monitors as required without any impact in the Serverless360 subscription pricing.

Data Monitor will have a minimal impact on your Azure subscription billing. This cost should not be a worry as free units included per month is 10,00,000 standard API calls. To know more about this charge in your preferred currency please check 'Azure Metrics API pricing'.

Pricing for Azure Monitor is based on the condition we define while creating an alert and each alert contributes to the bill for your Azure subscription.

For current prices in your currency and region, Azure Monitor Pricing.

## What can be monitored?

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/ygo1ig7wgo1jeblwvju1.png)

Service Bus, Logic Apps, Event Hubs, Storage Accounts are the Azure services that can be monitored using both Azure monitor and Serverless360 as of now. Read further for more details on the How Serverless360 complements Azure Monitor.

### 1. Monitor Azure Serverless Applications
The Azure Monitor supports monitoring Resource Groups containing multiple entities based on the activity logs. Need in real-time could be to monitor the state or performance of the entities in a resource group.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/tuq1tcgw247rs12varib.png)

In Serverless360, it is possible to monitor Azure Serverless applications. Composite Applications in Serverless360 can logically group Azure entities that participate in a business solution. With necessary monitoring configurations in place get instant feedback if the Composite app is in a healthy state or error state.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/8qhl4fg6s3e8xs8tbmok.png)

Logically group entities from different Azure subscriptions, regions, and resource groups in Serverless360 Composite Applications to represent your business solution.

### 2. Consolidated Report
Consider a business orchestration that involves entities like Service Bus Queue, Topic, Logic App, and Azure Function. The need here is to get to know the status of all these resources as a single consolidated report.

The Azure Monitor supports 3 out of the 4 entity types. An alert rule can be configured to monitor one entity on a couple of metrics only. To achieve the need, multiple alert rules need to be created which in turn would end up with several discrete reports which would further need effort in consolidation.

In contrast, Serverless360 provides a consolidated report on all the entities associated with the monitor, with a comprehensive view of the status of all the entities in one place. Find below a single report of Azure monitor for an entity on the left and the consolidated report from Serverless360 on the right.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/29452xw8n6wdfubiwyci.png)

A comprehensive overview of application health in a consolidated report from Serverelss360.

### 3. Monitor on Multiple Metrics
In Azure Monitor, the number of metric conditions per alert limited to two. Basically, in real-time for extensive monitoring, an entity needs to be monitored on more than two conditions, the user should create another alert which adds up to the cost.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/370w9wvufwxvqtjewpug.png)

In Serverless360, configure a single monitor for monitoring multiple entities on an exhaustive list of metrics with no additional cost.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/c5e8pl9r29jcly64q8m3.png)

### 4. Cost
In the Azure portal, there will be a cost for adding a condition for an alert which is $0.10 and added to the monthly bill. Only two conditions can be added to an alert, so the total cost for defining two conditions for an alert would be $0.20.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/hxys7licfj78xguw0sxb.png)

In Serverless360, the number of monitors does not impact the Serverless360 subscription cost. However, there is a cost associated with the metric queries executed by Serverless360 in the associate Azure subscriptions. This cost comes with free units of 10,00,000 standard API calls per month. To know more about this charge in your preferred currency please check 'Azure Metrics API pricing'.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/9g3yp88maqtxa20m3028.png)

### 5. Much more than Metrics Monitoring

#### Status/Health Monitor
In Azure Portal, it is not possible to monitor entities based on properties at required intervals.

To overcome this challenge Serverless360 comes with a solution called Status Monitor. The status monitor can get a consolidated report on the health status of all the entities in a Serverless Application at regular frequency say every two hours in a day.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/m8rd24det2tqgmgi3282.png)

#### Violation Monitor
The Azure Monitor cannot detect violations in the state or property of an Azure entity, which can be accomplished using Serverless360 Threshold Monitor.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/fh3mud290fuvo861o7my.png)

#### Topic Subscription/Event Hub Partition Monitoring
In the Azure portal, it is not possible to monitor Topic, Subscriptions, and Event Hubs partitions on their state or properties. In Serverless360, it is possible to monitor both Topic Subscriptions and Event Hubs partitions on critical properties like message counts.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/peoyd26t2xz6u141g6if.png)

#### Event Grid Monitoring
In the Azure portal, it is not possible to monitor Event Grid Topic and Subscription-based on metrics. In Serverless360, it is possible to monitor both the Event Grid Topic and Event Grid Subscription with an extensive set of metrics.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/639qrf85c6fjcl6pnf3t.png)

#### Relay Monitoring
In the Azure portal, it is not possible to monitor Relays, Hybrid Relay, or WCF Relay. In Serverless360, it is possible to monitor both Hybrid Relay and WCF Relay based on the metrics in a Data Monitor and listener count in Status or Threshold monitor.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/kxfgjh3hj5motmd69vh8.png)

#### Function App Monitoring
In the Azure portal, it is not possible to monitor Server Error or User Error for Azure Function Apps. In Serverless360, it is possible to monitor Azure Function Apps based on the Extensive set of metrics.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/yowrvngeqkwpunegtdhw.png)

Monitor Function Apps containing durable functions for efficiency, performance, consumption, and errors.

#### Different Entities in Single Monitor
In the Azure portal, it is not possible to monitor different entities in an alert. Each entity will need a single alert in the azure portal and It also costs for the number of conditions defined in an alert.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/e6fyai5baisblbmk8qtc.png)

In Serverless360, it is possible to monitor multiple entities under a single monitor and multiple monitors can also be created.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/b3rfli6squt2mp6mj0tl.png)

With out of box capabilities discussed above, Serverless360 indeed stands out as one platform solution for Azure Serverless monitoring and management.

Serverelss360 offers an enhanced version of Azure monitoring based on entity metrics along with much more monitoring solutions mentioned above in this article.

Originally published at [https://www.serverless360.com](serverless360.com/)