For the service, Microsoft leverages Network Performance Monitor (NPM). This allows customers to monitor end-to-end connectivity and performance across branch offices and VNETs. Before the release, Azure ExpressRoute customers would get connections enabled through exchange service and network service providers. These Microsoft partners are still in place, but the Network Performance Monitor has now been added. Users will find NPM under the Operations Management Suite with the following features:
NPM discovers your ExpressRoute circuit connections and routers across Microsoft and service provider edge and campus networks. Monitor connectivity to your workloads in Azure and identify specific hops that cause performance degradation for your users. View the health of these hops on an interactive network topology map. View the state of your network at any point in the past, with the Network State Recorder feature. This helps identify transient issues that network admins often struggle with.
Network Performance Monitor has been available since February. It checks application performance in the cloud and on-premises. The feature achieves this by executing synthetic transactions for latency and packet loss.
Availability
Basically, with the preview release, Microsoft has merged NPM into Azure ExpressRoute. The feature is currently limited to customers in East US, South East Asia, and West Europe regions. Microsoft points out the following abilities that come with the integration:
Measure packet loss and network latency across your ExpressRoute circuits. View bandwidth utilization for primary and secondary connections. Improve application performance by identifying circuits that are close to peak utilization. Built-in diagnostics detect downtime of the primary or secondary, determine if network traffic is flowing via ExpressRoute or around it. Set alerts on loss, latency and bandwidth utilization on a per VNET basis.
