Microsoft has recently made some branding changes that have resulted in the unification of many of its erstwhile standalone infrastructure and application monitoring services under the Azure Monitor banner. Azure Monitor, which previously was the recommended core infrastructure monitoring tool in Azure for collecting, visualizing, analyzing and responded to events related to metrics and a subset of logs, has now evolved into a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your on-premises and cloud (cloud agnostic) environments.
I’d like to preface the rest of this article by clarifying what I mean when I say “OMS is now Azure Monitor”, which while technically inaccurate, is arguably an apt assertion.
The Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) was a collection of cloud-based services that was designed to help you manage and protect your on-premises and cloud infrastructure. It was comprised of various management services including:
- Azure Automation: Provided the automation and control capabilities for OMS and enables consistent control and compliance capabilities across your environments, both on-premises, and in the cloud, including third-party clouds.
- Azure Backup: Provided the protection and recovery capabilities in OMS and provides you with reliable backup and restore capabilities to protect critical data both on-premises and in the cloud.
- Azure Site Recovery: Provided the protection and recovery capabilities in OMS and enables availability and disaster recovery through seamless replication, failover, and failback capabilities for your workloads.
- Log Analytics: Provided the insights and analytics capabilities in OMS, and enables rich insights into your environment from collected telemetry, and provides you with analytics capabilities across your workloads.
- Application Insights: Provided additional insights and analytics capabilities in OMS, and enables web application monitoring for availability, usage and performance.
With that said, the overwhelming majority of use cases for OMS were around the insights and analytics capabilities and the use of automation for alerting and event management workflows. What I mean is that 99% of the time when people referred to OMS, they were using the term incorrectly, and meant primarily, Log Analytics, and perhaps Application Insights.
So when I state that OMS is now Azure Monitor, I mean to say that what most people have thought of OMS as, – Log Analytics, is now a feature in Azure Monitor.
So what does this mean for OMS?
This means a couple of things, and I’ve attempt to cover most of them here:
- The OMS brand is being retired and OMS bundling is no longer available for new Azure customers.
- The OMS portal and all features therein has been moved to the Azure portal, and new portal features and capabilities will be introduced only in the Azure portal.
- According to Microsoft, the OMS portal will officially be retired on January 15, 2019.
- The Alerting experience in Azure is now based on Azure Monitor’s unified alerting interface that streamlines the alert management and event management capabilities in Azure.
- The OMS Mobile App will be deprecated along with the OMS portal.
What has happened to Log Analytics?
Log Analytics is vastly the most used underlying component of OMS and was treated as its own service in Azure for deep infrastructure monitoring for scenarios that Azure Monitor wasn’t suited for. Log Analytics has now undergone another branding evolution and is now a feature of Azure Monitor. It is important to understand that the underlying Log Analytics capabilities have not been lost, and in fact many new and extensive features have been added the Log Analytics feature of Azure Monitor.
Log Analytics holds all log data collected by Azure Monitor, and along with Application Insights, includes a powerful query language for retrieving, consolidating and analyzing collected data at scale. Log Analytics continues to play a very important part in the storage, analysis and other capabilities of Azure Monitor.
How do these changes affect the monitoring and management experience in Azure?
The unification of Application Insights and Log Analytics into Azure Monitor provides users with a single integrated experience for monitoring resources in hybrid environments, Azure and third-party clouds. This consolidation simplifies the evaluation of monitoring scenarios, and the management of alerting and event workflows. Refer to the Azure Monitor documentation for the most up-to-date guidance and updates. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/overview
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