Why Metrics Alone Don’t Cut It: What You Really Need for Azure Monitoring and Troubleshooting

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This is the tenth blog in our Azure Monitoring series, and it’s all about what metrics miss. We’ll break down why teams need more than CPU graphs to troubleshoot effectively and how events, logs, and traces work together to expose what’s really going on behind those “all green” dashboards. Missed our earlier posts? Check out the full series.
“Everything’s green—so why isn’t it working?”
If you’ve ever stared at a perfectly healthy Azure dashboard while users flood the help desk with complaints, you’re not alone. Metrics might say everything’s fine, but without the full picture, you’re left guessing.
This is the tenth blog in our Azure Monitoring series. We’re digging into why metrics-only monitoring doesn’t cut it anymore, and what your team actually needs to troubleshoot complex environments faster and smarter.
Metrics only show you symptoms. M.E.L.T. data reveals the cause.
Let’s go back to that stuck dashboard. A financial services ops team saw normal CPU, memory, and network usage. But customers couldn’t complete transactions, and no one knew why. After three weeks of finger-pointing, they found it: a missing database index. That config change went live just before the failures started—but without logs, traces, or event context, it stayed invisible.
Here’s the truth: metrics only tell you what’s happening. They rarely tell you why.
And that’s a problem when the clock is ticking. According to 2024 data, 82% of IT teams reported an MTTR of over one hour for production incidents, up from 74% the year prior (and dramatically higher than 47% back in 2021).
Azure Monitor gives you:
That’s a decent start. But without logs, traces, and event visibility, you’re missing:
You also hit retention limits (93 days max) and sampling gaps that can mask fast-moving problems. And if you’re not collecting higher-resolution metrics or paying for extra retention, critical data disappears before you even get a chance to analyze it.
Let’s say your VM shows high CPU. Metrics tell you something’s off. But they don’t answer:
Without supporting context—events, logs, and traces—you’re guessing. And guessing slows everything down.
After examining the limitations of metrics-only monitoring, it’s clear that a more comprehensive approach is needed. This is where events, logs, and traces become invaluable. These three observability pillars complement metrics by providing the context, causality, and connection details that metrics alone cannot deliver.
Events are the “what changed” signal every ops team needs. They fill in the blanks when metrics spike or alerts fire unexpectedly.
With event data, you can:
Event signals provide the timeline and causality that tie the rest of your telemetry together. Without them, you’re stuck searching for clues. With them, root cause often surfaces in seconds.
Logs give you the story behind the symptom. They show you:
Enriched logs that include change events—like deployments, config edits, and alert state transitions—make troubleshooting even faster. They show you what changed right before things went sideways.
In modern, service-heavy environments, tracing is your map. It connects the dots across services, functions, containers, and APIs. With traces, you can:
This matters when your app is no longer a single VM but a collection of interconnected services that each contribute to the user experience. Traces give you the full execution path, even when it spans dozens of components.
Collecting logs, traces, metrics, and events in separate tools is a visibility tax your team can’t afford. It leads to:
LogicMonitor Envision brings it all together.
When a pod crashes in AKS, LM Envision shows you:
Metrics provide vital health indicators, but they only tell part of the story. True observability requires the context and depth that events, logs, and traces deliver, transforming isolated data points into a comprehensive understanding of the system.
Organizations implementing observability across all four pillars consistently report:
And most importantly? You get your time back.
Next in our series: how LogicMonitor Envision enhances Azure monitoring. We’ll show how LogicMonitor fills the Azure Monitor gaps with unified visibility, intelligent alerts, and predictive analytics. Through customer stories, you’ll see how organizations achieve faster troubleshooting, fewer alerts, and better efficiency.
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