Hey everyone! I'm in the process of developing a debugging and automation app, and I want to gather insights on which Azure services are most commonly utilized in real-world settings. While I have solid experience with AWS, I'm looking to get a better understanding of Azure from those who work with it daily. I'm particularly interested in:
- Which Azure services do you use the most in your daily tasks?
- Are there specific services that cause the most challenges for operations or debugging?
- What tools do you find essential for effective support?
Any feedback from professionals in production environments would be super helpful. Thanks a lot!
5 Answers
In my day-to-day work, I lean heavily on Azure Monitor, Application Insights, and Key Vault. They are pretty much essential for every troubleshooting scenario. You also can’t go wrong with Storage Accounts and Event Hub since many services rely on them. The biggest headaches usually come from App Service during weird deployment issues and anything related to networking, like VNETs and DNS. If you're making debugging tools, definitely prioritize monitoring, logs, identity management, and networking for those real-world issues!
Glad you found it helpful!
I mostly work with AKS and have found it quite useful, though it does have its quirks. My team also frequently utilizes ARM/BICEP/Terraform alongside a variety of services like VMs, Storage Accounts, and Azure SQL databases. We might not use every single service available, but we definitely rely on these daily.
I can't stress enough how crucial DNS is in my work. It's like the backbone of everything we do, but dealing with IPv6 can be pretty wild!
App Services and Application Insights are quite significant for us, though we're thinking of phasing out App Insights due to its limitations. It's tricky — we experience odd behaviors with App Services compared to our experiences on VMs.
What are you planning to use instead of App Insights?
Still deciding, but we're exploring a few alternatives.
In my experience, managing identity via Entra ID is a critical part of our workflow. We handle numerous SSO integrations and use Entra for group management. Additionally, Azure DevOps is frustrating for source control as it lacks the third-party integration options that platforms like GitHub have. We've been using Grafana for our dashboards and alerting, which I highly recommend!
Grafana has become essential for us too!
Thanks a ton for your insights!