After been working with Log Analytics for some time, you get used to having the interface to query for the information you are looking for. In most cases you can collect any information you want using the Monitoring agent or from other parts of Azure (which have a direct integration to Log Analytics / Azure Monitor) or using a Syslog Collector/forwarder to get from other network devices in your enviroment. Log Analytics also has an HTTP Collector API which allows you to send data directly using the HTTP API. You can read more about the custom API here –> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/platform/data-collector-api
Now I stumbled across this product a couple of months back and been waiting a bit to write about it, but BlueMendora has a service called Bindplane which allows for easily collect data from different sources and forward it using the HTTP API Collector into Azure Monitor. They call it an IT Monitoring Integration As A Service product which essentially integrates and collects data from different sources and then move it into another destination.
Bindplane has a large set of different supported integrations from different vendors, where it can collect data from. Basically you just need to have an agent(Collector) installed somewhere on a Windows/Linux based machine that can connect to the source which will then feed data into the destination.
Some of the supported features for Microsoft Azure
Here I have now an collector which connects to a Citrix NetScaler instance to get information which will be feed into Azure Monitor. Bindplane has a set of predefinde metrics that it collects, and we can have them on or off, but we cannot change or add new metrics that are not available.
NOTE: Bindplane can feed data into Azure Monitor, Stackdriver, New Relic and Datadog, but in this scenario I’ve already setup integration with Azure Monitor and installed a agent. This is again then setup against Citrix NetScaler which the agent is connecting to using Nitro API to collect statstics and metrics.
Now clicking install dashboards here will essentially open a Azure ARM deployment to deploy dashboards into Azure Monitor, which will use the source data that the HTTP API Collector is feeding into the Log Analytics Workspace. (NOTE: All data coming from outside sources will be placed into the custom logs) folder in Log Analytics)
And from this data set you can then define different dashboards to view connection metrics on the different services that you have configured in Citrix.
If you want to give it a test run you can sign up for a trial here –> https://bluemedora.com/ it is pretty easy to setup and to collect information.