Last new-material lesson on the roadmap. Three tools that all sound like "tells you if something's wrong," but each answers a different question: is my setup good, is Azure itself having a problem, and what is my resource actually doing right now.
Two alerts arrive the same morning. One says: "East US is experiencing a service outage affecting Azure SQL Database, which you have resources in." The other says: "One of your VMs has been idle at 2% CPU for 30 days — consider resizing or shutting it down to save cost." Are these from the same tool?
Azure Advisor looks at your actual deployed resources and gives personalized recommendations to improve them, across five categories that mirror the Azure Well-Architected Framework: Reliability, Security, Performance, Cost, and Operational Excellence. It's proactive optimization advice about things you control — an underused VM, a missing backup, an open port.
Azure Service Health is a personalized dashboard of the Azure platform's own health — outages, planned maintenance, and health/security advisories — filtered to just the services and regions you actually use. It's not about how you configured anything; it's about whether Microsoft's side is having a problem.
Advisor — recommendations about your resources and how you've configured them (things you can fix). Service Health — status of Azure itself (things Microsoft has to fix, that you just need to know about).
Anchor: Advisor looks at you. Service Health looks at Azure.
Azure Monitor is the platform for collecting, analyzing, visualizing, and acting on telemetry from your resources — Azure, on-premises, or other clouds. It has a few pieces worth telling apart:
| Piece | Is |
|---|---|
| Metrics | Lightweight numerical time-series data (CPU %, request count), near real-time |
| Log Analytics | A workspace holding richer, structured log data, queried with Kusto Query Language (KQL) — more detail than metrics, slightly more latency |
| Alerts | Proactive notifications (or automated actions) when a metric or log query crosses a threshold you define |
| Application Insights | Azure Monitor's application performance monitoring (APM) feature — tracks requests, exceptions, dependencies, and live metrics specifically for a running app, not just infrastructure |
Calibration answer: no, different tools. The outage notice for East US Azure SQL is Service Health (Azure's own status). The idle-VM cost suggestion is Azure Advisor (a recommendation about your resource).