How to Monitor Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute & Network Performance
In Summary
Many Microsoft customers rely on Azure ExpressRoute to create private and secure connections between Microsoft cloud applications and their on-premise infrastructures. While many users enjoy the benefits of Azure ExpressRoute as is, it's important to keep monitoring your Azure ExpressRoute performance, to make sure you never lose connection with your favourite Microsoft services.
In this article, we’ll be running you through how and why to monitor network performance of Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute between your on-premise infrastructure, up to the Microsoft cloud.
Table of Contents 
- What is Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute?
- Why Configure Network Performance Monitoring for Azure ExpressRoute?
- Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Monitoring Setup
- End-to-End Network Performance Monitoring Results
- Expand Your Network Monitoring Setup
What is Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute?
Azure ExpressRoute is a service offered by Microsoft which allows you to create private connections between your on-premise networks and Microsoft cloud using a private connection facilitated by a connectivity provider. With ExpressRoute, you can establish connections to Microsoft cloud services, including Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365.
Connectivity can be established from an any-to-any (IPVPN) network, a point-to-point Ethernet network, or a virtual cross-connection through a connectivity provider at a co-location facility.
Azure ExpressRoute connections don’t go over the public Internet, which offers users higher security, reliability, and speeds with lower latencies than typical connections over the Internet. This is highly beneficial for users that require a connection speed and reliability for Azure assets or an entire Azure infrastructure.
Why Configure Network Performance Monitoring for Azure ExpressRoute?
You may already have some kind of monitoring system in place that probes your devices and alerts you if the device connection is down or if the CPU is too high. While a monitoring system of that kind is beneficial, and definitely something that you should hold on to, what happens if your provider, or third-party connector solution, begins to experience issues such as network congestion or packet loss? When that happens, most users rarely have tools in place to monitor these systems from end-to-end.
You don’t want these issues to go unnoticed until they wreak havoc on your network infrastructure.
Here’s how network performance monitoring can help:
1. Find Issues Immediately
The sooner you identify any issues within your network, the faster you can start working on fixing them. Any network problems that remain unidentified for long periods of time are a grave threat to your infrastructure. A network performance monitoring solution allows you to perform a network assessment and notifies you as soon as a network problem occurs, so you can get straight into problem-solving mode!
2. Protect the End-User
Finding and fixing issues quickly is detrimental to your business. The faster you fix a problem, the less time it’ll have to affect your customers or end-users. So that means you’ll increase productivity, and achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction.
3. Measure and Collect Data
You can’t really understand what you can't measure. Measuring something is the first step to improving your network. With network performance monitoring, you can measure your network performance and collect historical data to create a performance baseline. That way, you can always understand when your network performance is performing optimally, and when it’s below average.
4. Continuous Network Monitoring
A good continuous network monitoring solution will continuously monitor network performance to detect intermittent network issues that are often hard to pinpoint. It gives you all the data you need to measure and understand what’s happening within your network.
Check out our article on the differences between Fault Monitoring and Performance Monitoring to understand how performance monitoring focuses on identifying quality problems, which are often intermittent and hard to identify.
Learn how to perform a network assessment with Obkio Network Monitoring to optimize network performance for a new service deployment or migration.
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Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Monitoring Setup
Monitoring Azure Expressroute with Obkio is as easy as setting up any other monitoring session - which can be done in minutes!
1. Deploy Network Monitoring Agents
As with every Obkio monitoring setup, you need to deploy network monitoring Agents at strategic locations like your head office, remote office, data center etc, to monitor network performance using a distributed network monitoring solution.
You can learn more about distributed network monitoring and more in our article on the 10 most asked network performance questions.
Since you’ll want to monitor the network performance between Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute and your on-premise infrastructure, you’ll want to deploy two agents:
Microsoft Cloud Agent: We recommend the Software agent that can be installed on your favorite Windows, Docker, and Linux distribution, including Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS.
On-Premise Agent: If you have Linux or Windows servers, the Software (Linux, Windows, Docker) version is perfect. If you have an Hyper-V or VMware environment, the Virtual Appliance is ideal. Otherwise, we have hardware agents that are very easy to deploy and offer all of the same functionality. You can purchase Hardware Agents directly from the Obkio Store.
Learn about Obkio’s Network Monitoring Agents for Windows to collect network performance data and identify network issues. Try it for free!
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2. Obkio App Configurations
Once you’ve installed your monitoring agents at your chosen locations, you’ll need just two configurations which are required in the Obkio App:
All your network monitoring agents must be in the same Network. When two agents are in the same Network, they’ll communicate using private IPs instead of Public IPs.
You also need to configure a Network Monitoring Template to create the network performance monitoring session.
3. Start Monitoring
Once you’ve created your monitoring sessions, you can start collecting and analysing data using Obkio’s Cloud Engine, and view results in your Obkio App.
End-to-End Network Performance Monitoring Results
That's it! Monitoring Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute with Obkio is as simple as that.
Now, your network monitoring agents will send packets to each other every 500ms to measure network metrics such as latency, jitter, packet loss, and VoIP Quality with MOS Score.
Outages can be detected within 5 seconds and network degradation within a minute. You can also go back in time and see the exact network performance for every minute of the previous week with historical data, and create a network performance baseline.
Traceroutes are also executed periodically in both directions to identify hop-by-hop issues and to keep track of the historial latency between hops. With all these features, it'll be easier than ever to identify and troubleshoot network issues!
This monitoring setup also allows you to schedule automatic speed tests between the agents to monitor network speed and test the available throughput on the connection between your on-premise infrastructure and the Microsoft Cloud.
We also have another article about using our Public Monitoring Agents to monitor Microsoft network connectivity for apps like Teams and Office 365 as well!
Learn how to monitor Microsoft network performance of apps like Microsoft Teams, Office 365, and Azure.
Learn more
Expand Your Network Monitoring Setup
Now that you have your monitoring setup in place, it’s extremely easy to install more agents in branch offices, data centers and other clouds providers to monitor network performance. There are also Monitoring Agents available to monitor performance to your favorite service provider on the Internet.
If you haven’t already, get a free trial of Obkio’s Network Performance Monitoring Solution today!
