So, you have made the move to Azure. Following months of planning and preparation, your business has shifted much of its infrastructure, processes and data to Microsoft’s cloud environment. Things seem to be working well so far, and your colleagues are giving positive feedback.
But your finance team and the CEO are asking for evidence of return on the investment. You need to be able to show that your cloud licences are being used, and that the technology is genuinely saving your business money while making staff more productive.
To do this, you’ll need to do some cloud adoption monitoring and collect data on things like:
- Usage of Microsoft cloud apps
- Adoption of your own apps and software
- User activity across Azure
- Performance
- Security
- Costs
- Use of cloud storage
Let’s look at how to monitor Azure cloud adoption so you can report on progress and resolve any adoption issues.
What are you monitoring and why?
Before you begin with Azure cloud adoption monitoring, you first need to define exactly what you will be looking for – and why. The notion of technology ‘adoption’ can mean different things for different organisations, so it’s important to be clear exactly what you are trying to monitor. Depending on how your organisation works, Azure adoption could mean:
- The amount of time your employees spend using apps and services in the cloud
- The amount of data stored, or processes happening in Azure
- The usage levels of your company’s own cloud-based apps among your customers
- The number of workloads performed in the cloud versus on-premises (if you have a hybrid cloud model)
Whatever you are monitoring, you will also need to identify KPI’s that will give you an indication of adoption levels. For example, if a business is operating a hybrid cloud and on-premises infrastructure, they might want to analyse activity logs that show the number of hours employees spend using on-premises apps versus the amount of time they spend in equivalent cloud-based apps.
eBook: Tech adoption is all about change management – learn how
Ways to monitor Azure cloud adoption
The good news for IT teams is that Microsoft has provided several tools and features which can help monitor Azure usage. Microsoft logs all kinds of activity across its cloud, including telemetric data, application infrastructure activity and user behaviour. It’s simply a case of finding the data you need, and turning it into a consumable report.
There are many different Azure monitoring tools available, but if you’re keeping an eye on adoption, the most relevant tools are:
- Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor is a service that collects, and helps you analyse, telemetric data from your cloud and on-premises environments. You can use the logs it provides to view employee activity across all kinds of applications, infrastructure and platforms in Azure. You can also make use of APIs to gather data from external apps and services too.
All that data is collected and stored in Azure Monitor Metrics, which is a fully managed data store. From the Azure Monitor portal, you can analyse all kinds of things – from employee activity through to Azure availability. Azure Monitor also lets you perform ad hoc queries, create alerts and use Power BI to produce interactive reports.
- Azure Application Insights
Microsoft allows you to monitor how you company’s cloud-based applications are being used with Azure Application Insights. You can set up application insights from your Azure portal and then use this tool to track all kinds of data about how end users interact with the application, what they use it for, how many sessions they open, what browsers they use and all kinds of similar adoption data. You can also set it up to send alerts about behaviour (such as, for instance, a sudden decline in user numbers).
- VM Insights for virtual machines
If you are using Azure to run virtual machines for your employees in the cloud (as part of your hybrid working strategy, for instance) Azure VM Insights is a really useful tool. It can help you monitor all the virtual machines that are being used across your company in one place, to get an idea of how often they’re being used, when, where and what for.
Let FITTS monitor Azure cloud adoption for you
It is great that Microsoft provides several free tools to monitor Azure adoption, and they can be a great source of information. However, they are not always the most straightforward to set up and get running. And many organisations struggle with cloud monitoring – research shows that three-quarters of IT managers find that cloud network monitoring tools fail to address their requirements.
At FITTS, we have years of experience monitoring adoption in Microsoft Azure and can help you use tools and generate reports that provide you with genuinely useful information and get real insights into adoption levels in your cloud environment.
Contact us today to improve how you monitor Azure adoption.
