Alerts are important part of our monitoring and probably the most important one. Getting data and visualizing it is the foundation for alerts but in order to move to actual monitoring you need alerts. I can tell you nobody sits all day in front of dashboard and looks at visualized data. Alerts are also our knowledge of our applications and infrastructure gathered to help us when things are not going as planned. I wanted to write this blog post series for quite some time and I think this is the right time to do it. The reason for that is Classic Azure alerts are being deprecated and the vision of unified alerting capabilities is coming together and becoming more powerful… sort of. I will comment on parts that I think could and should be improved and hopefully they will be. I also expect some new features around Ignite as usually that is when Microsoft reveals some new stuff. They actually do it all the time it just the end development of some features matches Ignite conference time frame.