Azure Monitor is the platform for collecting, analyzing and acting on monitoring data from your Azure resources, on-premises machines and other clouds. It gathers data from applications, operating systems, Azure resources, subscriptions and the tenant, so you can understand how your systems are performing, spot problems early and respond automatically. It is the tool you use to watch your own workloads, as opposed to Service Health, which reports problems with Azure itself. Azure Monitor works with two main kinds of data. Metrics are numeric values collected at regular intervals, such as CPU percentage, available memory or requests per second. They are lightweight, near real-time and ideal for charts and fast alerts; many Azure resources send platform metrics automatically with no configuration, and you view them in Metrics explorer. Logs are records of events and data with rich properties, such as application traces, performance counters, security events, or activity log entries showing who changed what in your subscription. Logs are stored in a Log Analytics workspace, and data from inside a VM's operating system is collected by installing the Azure Monitor Agent and defining data collection rules. Most resources can also send their detailed resource logs to a workspace by adding a diagnostic setting.
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