Best practices for monitoring Microsoft Azure platform logs

Microsoft Azure provides cloud computing services that enable organizations to deploy and manage web applications across various industries. As the usage of Azure-based applications expands, securing all cloud resources becomes increasingly complex. Azure platform logs record user activity within an Azure environment, including who performed an action, what was done, when it occurred, and where it took place. Monitoring these logs is crucial for maintaining the security of Azure assets and identifying potential malicious activities before they can spread throughout the system. Azure uses Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to manage identity and access management across all resources within an organization. The organizational hierarchy of Azure resource directory consists of four levels: management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, and resources. Each level acts as a hierarchy, with permissions configured for an entity at a higher level applying to all sub-resources within that entity. Azure generates three categories of platform logs: Azure Active Directory reports, activity logs, and resource logs. Active Directory reports detail changes made in Azure AD and login activity, while activity logs record operations performed on an Azure resource, such as creating a virtual machine or editing the configuration of an Azure Pipeline. Resource logs capture operations within an existing Azure resource, like reads and writes to a vault in Azure Key Vault or to a database in Azure SQL Database. To interpret Azure platform logs, it is essential to understand common information shared across all log types, such as the caller field (identity of the user or service that performed the logged action), category field (which helps determine the log type), and other fields like resource group, subscription ID, and operation name. Monitoring key Azure platform logs can help detect potential vulnerabilities in an environment. Authentication logs provide a record of user activity, including login events, while resource-based logs focus on instances of resources with overly permissive access policies. By using a third-party log management solution like Datadog, organizations can gain a big-picture perspective of their Azure environment's activity and easily monitor these critical logs for potential threats. To ship Azure platform logs to Datadog, it is recommended to use Event Hubs, which are distributed data streaming pipelines that handle the large volume of platform logs generated by an Azure environment. Once the logs are collected with Datadog, custom dashboards can be created to visualize log data for a comprehensive understanding of the activity in the Azure environment. Additionally, built-in Threat Detection Rules automatically watch the logs for potential malicious activities and notify users as soon as security and compliance issues occur.