How can you monitor application failures and performance issues in Azure?

Using Azure Application Insights is the best way to monitor application failures and performance issues in Azure. Application Insights is specifically designed as a powerful application performance management (APM) service that enables you to collect telemetry data from your applications. It offers capabilities to track requests, exceptions, and performance metrics, which is fundamental for diagnosing issues within applications.

With Application Insights, developers can analyze live metrics, detect anomalies, and visualize the performance of application components in real-time. It also supports deep diagnostics, allowing you to drill down into specific issues, such as why requests are failing or which parts of your application are slowing down. The integration with Azure DevOps further enhances its monitoring capabilities by allowing teams to implement continuous monitoring and improve code based on real-time data insights.

While Azure Monitor is important for overarching resource monitoring and performance tracking across Azure services, and can include data from Application Insights, it is Application Insights itself that is tailored for detailed application-centric monitoring. The other options, like Azure Security Center and Azure Network Watcher, serve different purposes, focusing on security management and network monitoring respectively, rather than direct application performance and failure analysis.