Track These Azure Metrics to Protect Uptime and Stop Threats Early

This is the fifth blog in our Azure Monitoring series, and we’re focusing on what’s most critical: keeping your environment secure and always available. Performance and cost mean nothing if your services go offline or your data is compromised. In this post, we’ll highlight the Azure metrics that help CloudOps teams detect threats early, build resilience into their stack, and stay ahead of outages before they impact users or compliance. Missed our earlier posts? Catch up.

The success of cloud operations depends on security and availability. Your applications can run at lightning speed, and your costs can be optimized to the penny, but none of that matters if your services are compromised or unavailable.

Many teams rely too heavily on surface-level metrics, such as basic uptime checks and firewall logs, rather than focusing on more comprehensive measures. These checks are important, but they often miss the deeper signals that can predict security incidents and outages. That’s why the most resilient teams don’t just monitor infrastructure—they track behavior. Because early signals don’t come from alerts. They come from patterns.

TL;DR

Security and availability come first for a reason. Everything else—performance, cost, optimization—only matters if your environment is secure and running.

Suspicious logins and location-based anomalies often signal compromised credentials before a breach.

Multi-step WebChecks and response time metrics go beyond “up/down” to validate real service availability.

Frequent degraded states and transition spikes are early warning signs before full-blown outages.

Disaster recovery metrics like RTO and failover success rate help ensure your backup plan isn’t just shelfware.

Security Metrics: Spot Risks Before They Become Incidents

Authentication and Access Patterns

Many attacks begin with something simpler than an exploit: a compromised login. Once someone has valid credentials, they don’t need to break in. That’s why it’s so important to monitor authentication behavior, including not just failed attempts but also how, when, and where users sign in, particularly for high-privilege accounts.

What to track:

• Failed login attempts by time and source: A spike, especially from unfamiliar IPs or geos, is often the first sign of a credential stuffing or brute-force attempt.
• Authentication method trends: Track multi-factor authentication (MFA) usage versus password-only logins. If your most sensitive accounts still rely on weak authentication, that’s a problem waiting to happen.
• Privileged access activity: Unexpected logins from admin accounts during off-hours or from new locations should never go unchecked.

Pro tip

If a global admin logs in at 2:47 AM from a country they’ve never accessed before, don’t wait for an alert. That is your alert. LogicMonitor Envision can actually surface patterns from Azure AD sign-in data to help you track suspicious login attempts, MFA usage, and administrative actions, especially when paired with alerting based on location or time anomalies.

Network Security: Find Breaches Before They Spread

Not all breaches start with a bang. Skilled attackers don’t go straight for your public endpoints—they move quietly inside your network, scanning for weak links, testing lateral paths, and looking for misconfigurations to exploit. Your job is to catch them before they get a chance to move deeper or do damage.

Key network metrics:

• Blocked connection attempts: Track where unauthorized access attempts are coming from and whether they’re increasing over time.
• Unusual protocol usage: Flag unexpected traffic using remote desktop protocol (RDP), secure shell (SSH), or outdated communication methods that shouldn’t be in use.
• East-west traffic anomalies: If one internal system suddenly starts scanning multiple databases, it could be a breach in progress. While not a full-blown intrusion detection system, your monitoring solution should help detect sudden changes in internal traffic volume or direction, especially if paired with logs or flow data from Azure or your firewall.

Pro tip

If denied traffic on a specific port starts spiking, dig in. It could be an attacker probing from within, or a service you didn’t know was exposed. A platform like LM Envision helps teams track denied connections, protocol usage, and network anomalies, especially when combined with flow logs or firewall data from Azure.

Resource Access Behavior: Catch Subtle Attacks

Some of the most dangerous attacks don’t involve brute force at all. They start with valid credentials and quiet access patterns that fly under the radar. When someone already has the keys, they don’t need to make noise—they just need to avoid detection. That’s why it’s not enough to track failed logins. You also need to recognize when normal access starts to look unusual. 

What to monitor:

• Access velocity: Track how fast users or service accounts move between resources. If an account suddenly starts accessing multiple systems it’s never touched before, that’s suspicious.
• Permission utilization: Identify unused or overprivileged accounts. If a user has permissions they’ve never used, they might not need them, and an attacker definitely doesn’t.
• First-time access events: Monitor when a user or service accesses a sensitive system for the first time.
  

Pro tip: If a developer account that normally accesses test environments starts making database changes in production, don’t assume it’s a one-off. Investigate.

Security Posture and Compliance Trends

Security is all about reducing risk before an attacker even gets the chance. And in cloud environments, risk hides in misconfigurations, unpatched vulnerabilities, and slow response to change.

That’s where tracking security posture comes in. It’s not about passing every audit. It’s about keeping your environment aligned to the policies that protect your business.

Key posture metrics:

• Time to remediate vulnerabilities: How long does it take your team to patch known issues after discovery? Faster response = less exposure.
• Compliance drift: Watch for systems that fall out of compliance with frameworks like PCI-DSS, HIPAA, or ISO 27001. While LM Envision doesn’t generate compliance reports, it does surface configuration and backup drift, giving teams early warning when cloud infrastructure falls out of alignment with policy.
• Policy enforcement rate: If policies are being overridden or ignored, you’re not enforcing them; you’re documenting risk.
  

Pro tip

Don’t chase a perfect compliance score. Fix what’s risky, not just what’s required. The best security outcomes come from prioritizing impact, not chasing 100%.

Availability Metrics: Keep Services Running Smoothly

Uptime: Measure More Than ‘Is It Running?’

Just because something is “up” doesn’t mean it’s usable. A server might respond to a ping, but if your API’s returning errors or your checkout process is stalling, that’s downtime even if your uptime monitor is green. CloudOps teams need to go beyond basic reachability checks and measure actual service functionality from the user’s perspective.

What to monitor:

• User-perceived availability: Use HTTP checks to validate that services aren’t just responding—they’re working.
• Regional performance variations: Measure uptime and latency from different global locations to catch localized issues.
  Functional validation: A database might be “up” but still failing queries. Monitor success rates and timeout patterns, not just process status.

Pro tip

LogicMonitor doesn’t simulate full user journeys, but WebChecks allow teams to validate multi-step functionality and detect regional issues with real-time accuracy. Combined with response time tracking and log-based signals, this gives teams a much clearer view of whether services are not just reachable but usable.

Resource Health: Catch Failures Before They Happen

Most systems don’t fail without warning. They degrade first—slower response times, unstable performance, intermittent errors. If you’re only monitoring for hard failures, you’re missing the signals that could help you fix the issue before it becomes an outage.

Key resource health metrics:

• Degraded performance states: Monitor when a resource is running but operating at reduced capacity.
• Status transition frequency: Track how often systems switch between healthy, degraded, and unavailable states.
• Self-healing patterns: Measure whether systems recover automatically or require manual intervention.

Pro tip: LM Envision helps you stay ahead of full-blown failures by surfacing degradation patterns and correlating them across your infrastructure. With dynamic topology mapping, you can instantly see what other services or systems are affected, so you don’t just fix the symptom; you fix the cause.

Service Dependencies: Know What Breaks When Something Fails

In modern cloud environments, everything is connected. One slow service can ripple through half a dozen others and if you can’t see the chain, you can’t fix the impact.

Monitoring components in isolation might tell you what broke. Monitoring service dependencies tells you what else is breaking because of it.

Monitor:

• Service-to-service connectivity: Make sure dependent services are reachable and functioning together, not just in isolation.
• Cross-service failure correlation: Identify which failures impact others and prioritize fixes accordingly.
• Dependency risk mapping: Find the weakest services or fragile chains before they cause cascading downtime.

Pro tip

LM Envision automatically maps the relationship between your infrastructure and the services it supports. When something fails, you can instantly see what’s impacted, making it easier to triage incidents and restore services faster.

Disaster Recovery Readiness: Make Sure Failover Works

Backups are easy. Recovery is hard. Disaster recovery readiness is about knowing it works when you need it most. A 50-page runbook and an S3 backup won’t save you in the middle of a region outage if no one can execute it under pressure.

What to track:

• Recovery time actual vs. recovery time objective (RTO): Compare actual recovery times to what was planned.
• Failover success rate: Monitor whether failovers work as expected or introduce new issues.
• Automation coverage: Measure how much of your recovery process is automated versus requiring manual intervention.
  

Pro tip

If your failover plan can’t be tested without downtime, it’s not ready. Build disaster recovery into your operations like it’s going to be used because one day, it will be.

Build Security and Availability into CloudOps

Security and availability aren’t side concerns. They’re core to how modern CloudOps teams operate. One missed login anomaly can lead to a security breach. One untested failover path can turn a blip into an outage.

The best teams don’t treat these as separate problems. They bake protection into everything they monitor, correlate, and automate.

What they do differently:

• Track access and authentication patterns to catch threats early.
• Monitor service availability from the user’s point of view, not just server pings.
• Detect degraded performance before it turns into downtime.
• Test and validate failover workflows like they’ll actually need them because they will.

And they do it all with one goal in mind: building confidence, not just compliance.

LogicMonitor gives CloudOps teams the real-time telemetry, dynamic baselines, and service-level visibility they need to stay ahead of issues before users or auditors ever notice.

Up next: We’ll connect the dots between security, performance, and cost. Because in modern observability, nothing lives in isolation, and the teams that succeed are the ones that monitor accordingly.