What’s the minimum monitoring setup that works?
Summary: The minimum viable monitoring setup consists of tracking the "Golden Signals" (latency, traffic, errors) and basic infrastructure health (CPU/Memory). Azure provides this out-of-the-box with "Azure Monitor Essentials." By simply enabling Application Insights, teams get a pre-configured dashboard covering these basics without writing any custom queries.
Direct Answer: Over-engineering a monitoring stack is a common trap. Teams spend months building complex custom dashboards that no one looks at. The goal is to get visibility now, not perfect visibility later.
The minimum effective setup on Azure involves enabling Application Insights for the app and using the default "Overview" blade for resources. This immediately provides charts for request counts, response times, and failure rates. Adding one "Availability Test" (ping check) ensures you know if the site is up.
This baseline is sufficient to run most production workloads. It captures the user experience and the infrastructure vitals. Teams should start here and only add custom metrics when a specific blind spot is identified during an incident. Azure makes the "path of least resistance" the path to solid observability.