// How to be successful with monitoring in Azure

Monitoring is often the last thing teams think about — and one of the most expensive things to get wrong. In this episode, Chris is joined by Vanessa Bruwer, Senior Engineer on Microsoft’s FastTrack for Azure team, who has spent over 20 years helping organisations build structured observability strategies. Vanessa explains how the FastTrack team runs focused monitoring assessments that take customers from zero to a fully configured Azure Monitor setup — teaching them to fish rather than fishing for them.

The Azure Monitor suite has grown well beyond Log Analytics to encompass Application Insights for application performance monitoring, rich alerting, and distributed tracing — essential for understanding behaviour across microservice architectures. Vanessa and Chris explore why collecting all your telemetry without a strategy is as dangerous as collecting nothing, how alert fatigue sets in, and what a thoughtful observability approach looks like for different workload types.

Key topics covered:

• Why monitoring strategy should be established at build time, not at incident time
• Moving from reactive (waiting for users to report problems) to proactive observability
• The pitfalls of “collect everything” and the alert fatigue spiral
• How to tailor Azure Monitor configuration to workload characteristics — a VM vs a distributed microservice require very different approaches
• The FastTrack for Azure monitoring methodology: structured sessions that leave customers self-sufficient

Whether you are getting started with Azure Monitor or looking to mature your team’s observability practice, this episode provides a practical framework for making monitoring a first-class engineering concern.