Azure Network Watcher offers network monitoring and troubleshooting features to enhance visibility and actionable insights. The service includes out-of-the-box health metrics, topology display, connectivity supervision, traffic monitoring, and a diagnosis suite. One of the new capabilities of Azure Network Watcher is virtual network flow logs, which provide information on IP traffic within virtual networks. This allows users to monitor and optimize usage, troubleshoot connectivity issues, ensure compliance, and conduct security analysis in a lightweight and scalable manner.
Network flow logs offer several benefits, including the ability to capture network traffic data within specific scopes such as virtual networks, subnets, or network interface cards. This helps in meeting audit and compliance requirements, identifying top talkers on the network, troubleshooting connectivity problems, observing encrypted traffic, and performing security analysis to detect malicious activities. Flow logs are currently supported in network security groups, allowing users to log traffic within the scope of their virtual networks and stream data to Azure Storage accounts for further analysis and visualization in various tools such as SIEM solutions and IDS.
By enabling traffic analysis, users can aggregate and enrich flow data to gain deeper visibility into user and application activities, as well as identify malicious IP communications within their networks. This can help in improving network security and performance by monitoring traffic levels, bandwidth consumption, and detecting any anomalies or potential threats. Virtual network flow logs provide a comprehensive solution for monitoring and optimizing network traffic within Azure environments.
Overall, Azure Network Watcher’s virtual network flow logs offer a valuable tool for network administrators and security professionals to enhance observability, troubleshoot connectivity issues, ensure compliance, and improve overall network performance. The ability to capture and analyze network traffic data within virtual networks in a scalable and efficient manner can provide actionable insights and help in identifying potential security risks or performance bottlenecks. It is essential for organizations to leverage such capabilities to enhance their network monitoring and security operations within Azure environments.
Article Source
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/general-availability-virtual-network-flow-logs/