AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions Exam

Recommend a Solution to Optimize Network Performance

Evaluate and Implement Azure Network Optimization Services

When it comes to optimizing network performance in Azure, there are several services and tools available to help monitor and enhance your network's efficiency. Azure Monitor and Network Watcher are essential tools that provide important telemetry to identify latency and throughput bottlenecks within your network. By analyzing the detailed performance metrics through Network Performance Monitor, you can monitor reachability to Microsoft 365 and other services, helping you detect issues before they impact your applications. These tools allow you to establish a performance baseline and track any deviations to maintain optimal operations.

Traffic Analytics is another powerful tool offered by Azure. It is a cloud-based solution that analyzes NSG Flow logs to provide visibility into your network activity. Some of the key insights gained from Traffic Analytics include:

• Traffic flows between Azure, the Internet, and peered networks
• Top talkers identifying chatty applications without needing packet sniffers
• Capacity utilization of VPN gateways and other related services

These insights help you audit your network activity, optimize performance by resizing or redistributing traffic, and secure your workloads.

Additionally, DNS Analytics collects and correlates DNS logs to provide security, operations, and performance insights. This service helps identify clients resolving to malicious domains, detect stale resource records, and monitor DNS query loads alongside registration failures. It helps maintain DNS reliability while reducing lookup latency by eliminating potential misconfigurations or unwanted attacks.

ExpressRoute Insights through Network Insights offers a unified view of your private circuits with detailed topology and metrics dashboards. With ExpressRoute Insights, you can visualize functional dependencies across peerings and gateways, track critical metrics like Availability (ARP/BGP), Throughput (ingress/egress), Packet Drops, and Gateway Metrics, and navigate linked resources to drill down into data in real-time. These capabilities are essential for designing resilient architectures that meet stringent SLAs for throughput and availability.

When designing network solutions on Azure, it is crucial to compare the features and SLAs of services such as Azure CDN, Front Door, Traffic Manager, Load Balancer, and ExpressRoute to ensure they align with your performance and resilience requirements. By integrating these services effectively:

• Global load-balancing can help achieve low latency
• Private connectivity ensures consistent throughput
• Edge caching offloads traffic from origin servers

Combining these services in an integrated deployment allows for predictable latency, high availability, and optimal network performance tailored to specific needs based on telemetry data.

Conclusion

In summary, optimizing network performance in Azure involves using various tools and services such as Azure Monitor, Network Watcher, and more specialized tools like Traffic Analytics, DNS Analytics, and ExpressRoute Insights. Understanding the features and SLAs of different services including Azure CDN, Front Door, Traffic Manager, Load Balancer, and ExpressRoute plays a crucial role in designing an effective network solution that balances performance, resilience, and availability. Proper analysis and monitoring enable precise configurations that align with performance requirements, ensuring an optimized network environment.