The AZ-104: Microsoft Azure Administrator certification exam covers various domains, and one of the critical sections is monitoring and backing up Azure resources. This guide provides a detailed overview of key Azure services and concepts essential for monitoring, alerting, and backing up resources in preparation for the AZ-104 exam.
Table of Contents
- Introduction to Azure Monitoring and Backup
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Azure Monitor
- Metrics and Logs
- Alerts and Notifications
- Application Insights
- Log Analytics
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Azure Backup
- Backup for VMs
- Azure Backup for Files, SQL, and Other Workloads
- Backup Policies
- Restoring Resources
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Azure Site Recovery (ASR)
- Replicating and Protecting Resources
- Failover and Recovery Scenarios
- Monitoring Azure with Network Watcher
- Azure Policy and Governance for Monitoring
- Best Practices for Monitoring and Backup in AZ-104
- Key Azure Management Tools for Monitoring and Backup
- Tips for Passing the AZ-104 Exam
1. Introduction to Azure Monitoring and Backup
Monitoring and backing up resources in Azure are crucial tasks for maintaining the health, performance, security, and availability of cloud infrastructure. In the AZ-104 exam, you'll be tested on your ability to implement and manage tools like Azure Monitor, Azure Backup, Log Analytics, and Azure Site Recovery (ASR) to ensure resources are monitored and protected in case of failures or disasters.
2. Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor is the central service for monitoring the availability, performance, and operations of your Azure resources. It collects metrics, logs, and diagnostic data from Azure services, applications, and infrastructure.
Metrics and Logs
- Metrics are numerical values collected at regular intervals from resources, like CPU usage, memory consumption, or disk IO.
- Logs contain detailed information about resource events, errors, and other activities. Azure Monitor aggregates logs from resources like virtual machines, Azure App Services, and AKS clusters.
You can access metrics and logs from various Azure resources via the Azure Portal, Azure CLI, or PowerShell.
Alerts and Notifications
Alerts in Azure Monitor help you stay informed about critical conditions in your environment by triggering actions when a specific condition is met. Alerts can be set up to monitor:
- Metrics: E.g., trigger an alert when CPU utilization goes above 80%.
- Logs: E.g., trigger an alert when a specific error appears in application logs.
Action Groups are used to notify individuals or teams through emails, SMS, or integration with tools like Azure Automation, Logic Apps, or ITSM tools.
Application Insights
Application Insights is a part of Azure Monitor that focuses on monitoring live web applications. It provides insights into the performance, availability, and usage patterns of applications and includes:
- Dependency tracking: Understand how external services affect your app.
- Request rates and response times: Track the number of incoming requests and their performance.
- Custom events: Track business-specific metrics and operations.
Log Analytics
Azure Log Analytics is the query engine of Azure Monitor that helps collect, query, and analyze log data. Using Kusto Query Language (KQL), you can run queries to filter and visualize data from multiple sources, allowing you to track trends, investigate incidents, or drill into specific operational details.
3. Azure Backup
Azure Backup is a fully managed service designed to back up and restore Azure resources like virtual machines (VMs), databases, files, and more. Backup ensures that you can recover data or workloads in case of accidental deletions, hardware failures, or other issues.
Backup for VMs
Azure Backup can create consistent backups of your virtual machines, whether they're running Windows or Linux. You can manage these backups through:
- Azure Portal: Simplified backup management.
- Backup Policies: Define schedules for backups (daily, weekly, monthly) and retention periods.
Azure Backup for Files, SQL, and Other Workloads
Azure Backup can be used to protect:
- Azure Files: Back up Azure file shares for restoring file systems.
- SQL Databases: Use Azure Backup for SQL to protect databases in SQL Server VMs and Azure SQL Managed Instances.
- On-premises Workloads: Using the Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS), you can back up on-premises systems to Azure.
Backup Policies
Backup policies define:
- Frequency: How often backups are taken (daily, weekly).
- Retention: How long the backups are kept.
- Recovery Points: The number of restore points maintained for a resource.
Backup policies can be applied to individual or multiple VMs, databases, or workloads at once, ensuring a consistent strategy.
Restoring Resources
Azure Backup provides two types of restores:
- File-level restore: Restore specific files from a backup.
- Full VM restore: Restore an entire virtual machine from a backup point. You can restore VMs to the same region or another region for disaster recovery.
4. Azure Site Recovery (ASR)
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is designed for disaster recovery. It replicates Azure and on-premises workloads to a secondary location (usually another Azure region). In case of a failure, ASR enables you to fail over to the secondary region to ensure high availability.
Replicating and Protecting Resources
ASR supports replicating:
- Azure Virtual Machines to another Azure region.
- On-premises Hyper-V and VMware VMs to Azure.
Failover and Recovery Scenarios
ASR helps you manage planned and unplanned failovers. During a failover, the system transfers control to the secondary location with minimal downtime. Once the primary location is operational again, you can trigger a failback to restore services back to the original region.
ASR also provides automated recovery plans, which define the order in which services are restored in a failover scenario.
5. Monitoring Azure with Network Watcher
Azure Network Watcher helps you monitor, diagnose, and gain insights into your network's performance and operations. It can be used for:
- Connection Monitoring: Diagnose connectivity issues between a VM and other services.
- Packet Capture: Capture network traffic to troubleshoot issues.
- Network Performance Monitor: Analyze latency and bandwidth between services.
Network Watcher’s features, such as the IP flow verify and Next Hop tools, help identify and resolve network configuration issues and misrouted traffic.
6. Azure Policy and Governance for Monitoring
Azure Policy helps enforce organizational standards and assess compliance across Azure resources. By using policies, you can ensure that resources are monitored and protected as per defined standards. For example:
- Enforce Monitoring: Use Azure Policy to automatically enable monitoring services like Azure Monitor or Log Analytics for all new VMs.
- Backup Compliance: Ensure all virtual machines or databases are part of a backup policy.
Azure Policy can also work in conjunction with Azure Blueprints, which provide pre-configured environments with built-in policies, monitoring, and security.
7. Best Practices for Monitoring and Backup in AZ-104
- Use Action Groups for Alerts: Set up action groups to ensure your team is notified through email, SMS, or ITSM tools in case of performance degradation or failure of critical services.
- Enable Log Analytics for Comprehensive Monitoring: Integrate Azure resources with Log Analytics for deeper insights and the ability to query logs across multiple services.
- Automate Backup Policies: Apply consistent backup policies to all resources to ensure data is protected without manual intervention.
- Use Recovery Services Vault: Organize your backup data and recovery points using the Recovery Services Vault.
- Leverage ASR for Disaster Recovery: For critical workloads, configure Azure Site Recovery for replication and automated failover to another region.
8. Key Azure Management Tools for Monitoring and Backup
- Azure Portal: Manage and monitor resources graphically.
- Azure CLI and PowerShell: Automate monitoring configurations, backup operations, and disaster recovery setups.
- Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Templates: Use ARM templates for deploying monitoring services like Log Analytics and Backup configurations in a repeatable manner.
- Azure Monitor Dashboards: Build custom dashboards for real-time monitoring of resource metrics and logs.
9. Tips for Passing the AZ-104 Exam
- Understand Backup Types: Familiarize yourself with Azure Backup for VMs, file shares, and databases.
- Know How to Configure Alerts: Be prepared to configure metric- and log-based alerts using Azure Monitor.
- Practice Failover Scenarios: Understand the steps involved in configuring Azure Site Recovery and performing failovers.
- Learn Log Analytics Queries: Practice writing basic Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries to filter and analyze log data.
- Master the Use of Network Watcher: Be prepared to troubleshoot network connectivity and latency issues using Network Watcher’s diagnostic tools.
Conclusion
Monitoring and backing up Azure resources are essential tasks for ensuring performance, availability, and disaster recovery. To pass the AZ-104 exam, you need to be proficient in tools like Azure Monitor, Azure Backup, Log Analytics, Azure Site Recovery, and Network Watcher. By understanding the best practices and configurations for these services, you’ll be well-equipped to manage and protect Azure workloads in real-world scenarios.
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