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Azure Network Watcher

Score7.1 out of 10

9 Reviews and Ratings

What is Azure Network Watcher?

Microsoft's Azure Network Watcher monitors, diagnoses, and provides insights into network performance and health.

Categories & Use Cases

Top Performing Features

  • Alerts

    Alerts warning of critical infrastructure component failure can be sent via email or SMS or other channel

    Category average: 8.7

  • Network capacity planning

    Capacity planning analyzes interface utilization, disk usage, etc. and allows identification of capacity problems well in advance of threshold breach

    Category average: 7.6

  • Customizable reports

    Ability to schedule, generate, and deliver custom performance and availability reports

    Category average: 8

Areas for Improvement

  • Hardware health monitoring

    Ability to monitor key hardware metrics including temperature, fan speed, and power supply

    Category average: 9.2

  • Baseline threshold calculation

    Calculation of baseline thresholds so to establish warning thresholds

    Category average: 8.4

  • Wireless infrastructure monitoring

    Ability to monitor wireless access points, controllers, and connected clients

    Category average: 7.5

Fantastic tool for monitoring, diagnostic and logging network activities

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Azure Network Watcher for various purpose in our organization, we have multiple on-premises official websites in various locations hence using Azure Network watcher to monitor, view metrics, setting up alerts, repairing health of IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) products like load balancer, virtual machines etc. Azure Network watcher has a wide scope in networking area.

Pros

  • Monitoring network traffic logs
  • Monitor/Diagnose communication between virtual machines
  • Reasonable Pricing

Cons

  • Security measures can be improved
  • Initial Setup process is complex and should be simplified
  • User interface can be improved

Return on Investment

  • Positive impact as it helps in setting up critical alerts
  • Monitoring network, hardware
  • Customizable reports can be set which helps in business objective

Alternatives Considered

ThousandEyes

Other Software Used

ThousandEyes, PRTG Network Monitor, Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

Azure Network Watcher for Network Analytics

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is used for troubleshooting Azure Cloud related Network issue. Useful tools such as Topology, Connection Monitor, Network Performance Monitor and Next Hop are extremely beneficial. It has helped us with diagnosing specific issues related to Network. We use this for our entire Azure Tenant Environment and also for some On-premise Connectivity such as Express Route Monitoring.

Pros

  • Assists us in verifying IP Flow inbound and outbound from IAAS Resources.
  • Allows us to view the effective security rule on a Network Security Group and the IAAS Resource.
  • Visualize your Traffic Patterns and security via the Traffic Analytics tool
  • Allows for deep packet captures for analysis.

Cons

  • More granular visualization through the Azure Network. Ex. Seeing NSG Flow through each Hop.
  • Allow for more capabilities to view Connectivity through On-Premise Networks.

Return on Investment

  • Helped us diagnose IP and Port flow from a DNS integration project resulting in success of the project
  • Has helped numerous times analyzing IP Port flow from Resources

Alternatives Considered

SolarWinds Network Topology Mapper

Other Software Used

Veeam Backup for Azure, Azure Backup, Azure Bastion

Azure Network Watcher as NPM for the Cloud

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently, we are using the Azure Network Watcher to capture packet data from the virtual systems and monitor the traffic and performance of Load balancers in the Cloud.

Pros

  • Monitor endpoints Health for Azure Traffic Manager
  • Monitor VM Machine resources
  • Deliver reports for IT department

Cons

  • Agent can't be installed in some VM Appliance machines
  • Improve the dashboard & graphics
  • Improve the API integration

Return on Investment

  • We could disable some NPM systems on-premise

Alternatives Considered

SolarWinds Observability

Other Software Used

Azure Traffic Manager, OP5 Monitor, Checkmk

Integration and Simplicity for Cloud Network Analysis

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I used it to monitor, diagnose and view metrics for resources in Azure Network Watcher's virtual network (Virtual Machines, Virtual Networks, Application Gateways, Load balancers, etc..). The most important features that I used are: IP flow to verify if a packet is allowed/denied to/from a VM and next-hop to monitor traffic from between the VM and destination based on the effective routes associated with a network interface nic.

Pros

  • View resources and theri relationship
  • Diagnose network routing problems
  • View security rules for a network interface

Cons

  • Capture packets
  • Diagnose network traffic filtering problems
  • Diagnose ngs rules

Return on Investment

  • Less time spent on network troubleshooting

Alternatives Considered

Auvik

Other Software Used

Azure Network Watcher, Auvik