Evaluate and Implement Azure Network Optimization Services
Telemetry and Bottleneck Analysis
Azure Monitor and Network Watcher provide the telemetry you need to pinpoint latency and throughput bottlenecks across Azure networks. Network Performance Monitor helps you track reachability to services like Microsoft 365 and captures detailed performance metrics. By analyzing network traffic patterns, you can identify hotspots before they affect applications. Establish a performance baseline using built-in tests and logs, then track deviations to find where delays or drops occur.
Traffic Analytics for Visibility
Traffic Analytics is a cloud-based solution that analyzes NSG Flow logs to give you deep visibility into network activity. It surfaces traffic flows between Azure, the internet, and peered networks, identifies top talkers and chatty applications without needing packet sniffers, and shows capacity utilization of VPN gateways and other services. These insights let you audit network activity, secure workloads, and optimize performance by resizing or redistributing traffic.
DNS Analytics for Reliability
DNS Analytics collects and correlates DNS logs to provide security, operations, and performance insights. It identifies clients resolving to malicious domains, detects stale resource records, and monitors DNS query loads and registration failures. This service helps you maintain DNS reliability and reduce lookup latency by uncovering misconfigurations or attacks before they cause problems.
ExpressRoute Insights for Private Circuits
ExpressRoute Insights through Network Insights gives you a unified view of your private circuits with detailed topology and metrics dashboards. You can visualize functional dependencies across peerings and gateways, track Availability (ARP/BGP), Throughput (ingress/egress), Packet Drops, and Gateway Metrics, and navigate linked resources to drill into data in real time. These metrics help you design resilient architectures and meet stringent SLAs for throughput and availability.
Service Comparison and Integrated Deployment
When designing network solutions, compare the features and SLAs of services such as Azure CDN, Front Door, Traffic Manager, Load Balancer, and ExpressRoute to align with your performance and resilience requirements. Use an integrated deployment that leverages global load-balancing for low latency, private connectivity for consistent throughput, and edge caching to offload origin servers. By combining these services and tailoring configurations based on telemetry, you can achieve predictable latency, high availability, and optimal network performance.