Architecting IoT Solutions on Azure

Chapter 13. Monitoring and Logging

When driving, besides the road, you probably most often pay attention to the speedometer and maybe a GPS if you’re using one. These two provide telemetry about how fast you’re going and where you’re located. But sometimes, you will see something else pop up, such as a check engine light. This indicator tells you that something is wrong with the car itself, and you should get it inspected.

In an IoT solution, you need to have a check engine light for your solution. You learned how to deal with device telemetry and events over the past 12 chapters, but now you must look at how to monitor your solution. Monitoring tracks IoT devices and services’ health, behavior, and utilization, enabling businesses to respond proactively to potential issues and enhance the overall user experience. To do this, there are several key aspects of monitoring online IoT solutions, but it all starts with figuring out what exactly you need to watch for. These are your goals, and when things fall out of bounds, this is where you raise the alarm. But let’s start with establishing what we need to consider as goals and translating those into service level agreements.

Setting Goals with Service Level Agreements

One of the most important things you need to do before setting up monitoring is to establish the goals you want to achieve with your system. These goals are typically expressed as growth goals or service level agreements (SLAs). Growth goals are usually business drivers ...