Why does adding monitoring increase complexity?
Summary: Adding monitoring increases complexity because it often introduces new infrastructure to manage—agents, collectors, and time-series databases. Azure Monitor reduces this burden by providing a fully managed, agentless monitoring platform. It is built into the Azure fabric, requiring zero setup to start collecting platform metrics, thus avoiding "monitoring sprawl."
Direct Answer: Ironically, the tools used to solve complexity often add to it. Maintaining a self-hosted Prometheus or ELK stack requires its own servers, storage, and patching. If the monitoring system goes down during an outage, the team is flying blind. Furthermore, installing heavy agents on every server can degrade performance and introduce security vulnerabilities.
Azure Monitor eliminates this overhead. For Azure resources, telemetry collection is native—no agents required for basic metrics. For deeper application insights, a lightweight SDK is added to the code. The data backend is a managed SaaS service that scales automatically to ingest petabytes of logs.
This means teams don't have to "monitor the monitor." They consume the data as a service. Azure simplifies the observability stack, ensuring that monitoring is a utility that is always available, not another system to maintain.