Azure Monitor vs Advisor vs Service Health vs Log Analytics vs Application Insights
Verdict: Monitor is the collection platform. Log Analytics queries what it collected. Application Insights watches web apps. Advisor gives best-practice recommendations. Service Health reports Azure platform outages and maintenance.
| Criterion | Azure Monitor | Azure Log Analytics | Application Insights | Azure Advisor | Azure Service Health |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Job | Collects and centrally stores logs and metrics | Interactive queries over collected data | Web app performance and usage | Personalised best-practice recommendations | Azure platform health for your services |
| Answers | Dashboards, queries, alerts backbone | Find errors, visualise trends | Request rates, failures, availability tests | Reliability, security, cost, performance, ops | Outages, planned maintenance, advisories |
| Choose when | Central telemetry pipeline | Write and run log queries | Instrument a live web app | Improve a subscription's posture and cost | Track incidents affecting Azure itself |
Rules
- Choose Azure Monitor as the platform that collects logs and metrics from Azure, on-premises and multicloud sources and stores them centrally for dashboards, queries and alerts.
- Choose Azure Log Analytics to write and run interactive queries against the data Azure Monitor already collected, for example every error in the last hour.
- Choose Application Insights to monitor a web app's request rates, response times, failure rates and synthetic availability tests.
- Choose Azure Advisor for a personalised guide of best-practice actions across reliability, security, performance, operational excellence and cost.
- Choose Azure Service Health to stay informed about outages, planned maintenance and advisories affecting the Azure services and regions you use.
Traps
- Azure Monitor is the collection platform, not the query tool; the interactive query interface on top of it is Log Analytics.
- Service Health reports Azure platform events, not your own resource metrics; a VM CPU alert belongs to Azure Monitor, not Service Health.