Azure Cookbook

Chapter 11. Management and Monitoring

So far in this book you have provisioned and configured several Azure services that enable you to implement business solutions in the Azure cloud. You created these services in your Azure subscription, which exists under your Azure account. In this chapter, we discuss the services and tools that enable you to manage and monitor the resources under your Azure account.

Almost all Azure resources support tags. Azure tags are metadata elements that you can apply to Azure resources. For example, you can track which department should pay for the provisioned resources by adding department=finance or department=IT tags. Tagging also enables you to easily find resources belonging to the same project and generate reports for them. In this chapter, you will add tags to resources, manage the tags, and list the resources with the same tag values.

Managing costs is critical for the success of any project. Microsoft helps you estimating the cost of resources before provisioning them using the Azure pricing calculator. This gives the cloud architects and infrastructure professionals the information they need to choose the best resources for their budgets. After the resources are provisioned, you can see the billing history and current cost reports using the Microsoft Cost Management and Billing suite of tools in the Azure portal. In this chapter, you will work with both the Azure pricing calculator and Microsoft Cost Management and Billing tools.

You should ...