Application monitoring transforms raw telemetry into actionable insights about system health, performance characteristics, and operational anomalies. Effective monitoring encompasses availability tracking, performance metrics, error rate analysis, and resource utilization measurement—providing the visibility required for proactive incident response and continuous performance optimization.
Modern .NET applications leverage Azure Monitor, Application Insights, and Azure Log Analytics to collect distributed traces, performance counters, custom metrics, and structured logs. Monitoring extends beyond reactive alerting to include synthetic monitoring (availability tests), real user monitoring (RUM), and application performance management (APM) capabilities that correlate business metrics with infrastructure performance.
Monitoring as Security Control
ISO/IEC 27001 Control A.12.4 mandates logging and monitoring as fundamental security controls—not optional operational features. Compliance frameworks require comprehensive audit trails of security events, alerting on anomalous access patterns, and monitoring of privileged account activities. ISO/IEC 27017 cloud guidance extends these requirements to include monitoring of cloud resource configuration changes and access control modifications.
Monitoring must capture authentication failures, authorization denials, data access patterns, and API rate limit violations. Health check endpoints provide continuous validation of application dependencies (databases, external APIs, storage services) and satisfy compliance evidence requirements for operational monitoring. Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) integration enables correlation of application events with infrastructure security signals.
Monitoring Best Practices
Structured Telemetry: Implement semantic logging with correlation IDs, emit custom metrics for business KPIs, and use distributed tracing to visualize request flows across microservices.
Alerting Strategy: Define Service Level Objectives (SLOs), configure alerts based on Service Level Indicators (SLIs), implement alert routing to on-call teams, and establish alert suppression during maintenance windows to prevent alarm fatigue.
Performance Baselines: Establish performance baselines during normal operations, implement anomaly detection for deviations, and correlate performance degradation with deployment events.
Cost Optimization: Monitor telemetry ingestion costs, implement sampling for high-volume traces, and use log aggregation to control data retention expenses.
Related Topics
Monitoring integrates with observability practices, logging strategies, security operations, azure services, compliance requirements, and dotnet instrumentation. For testing perspectives, see testing.