Real-Time Monitoring & Incident Command Center (Azure Monitor + Grafana)

Category: Operations

Architecture diagram

High-level view of the main components and data/control flows.

Low-level architecture diagram (Visio-style)

Implementation view (networking, security, ops). Click to open full size.

Low-level architecture details

Step-by-step implementation

Step 1/6

Define SLOs and alert strategy

• Define key signals: availability, latency, saturation, errors.
• Reduce noise with actionability rules.
• Define severity and on-call rotations.

Validation checklist

• Stakeholders have signed off the scope, SLAs, and data/security requirements.
• You have documented naming standards, environments, and ownership (RACI).

Step 2/6

Centralize telemetry

• Create Log Analytics workspace per environment or central.
• Enable diagnostics on key resources.
• Standardize log tables and retention.

Validation checklist

• Deployment completed; smoke tests passed; rollback plan confirmed.

Step 3/6

Dashboards (Workbooks + Grafana)

• Build Azure Monitor Workbooks for platform KPIs.
• Use Managed Grafana for multi-source dashboards.
• Create an incident view: top alerts, services impacted.

Validation checklist

• Logs and metrics are flowing (check Log Analytics / Monitor).
• Alerts trigger correctly (test alert path to email/Teams/ITSM).

Step 4/6

Incident automation

• Use Action Groups for paging and ITSM creation.
• Automate Teams war-room creation.
• Track incident timeline and postmortems.

Validation checklist

• Connections/authentication succeed and test messages/records flow through.
• Retries/DLQ/error handling are configured and validated with a forced failure.

Step 5/6

Secure access to monitoring

• Use RBAC and least privilege for dashboards.
• Separate reader vs responder roles.
• Audit changes to alert rules.

Validation checklist

• Security baseline applied (Defender/Policy/WAF/Firewall rules as applicable).
• No public endpoints unless explicitly approved; private endpoints verified where applicable.
• Alerts are configured for high-risk events.

Step 6/6

Run incident simulations

• Game days: simulate outage and validate paging.
• Measure time-to-detect and time-to-mitigate.
• Improve runbooks and dashboards.

Validation checklist

• UAT completed with representative users and scenarios.
• Performance meets baseline; issues tracked and remediated.

Video tutorials

• Azure Videos (Monitoring)
• Azure Friday playlist (search for Azure Monitor / Managed Grafana)

References

• Azure Monitor
• Azure Managed Grafana