What is Microsoft Azure Data Factory?

Microsoft Azure Data Factory is a cloud-based data integration service provided by Microsoft Azure. It enables you to create, manage, and automate data workflows that move and transform data from different sources to various destinations. Essentially, ADF allows you to design, orchestrate, and manage data pipelines, making it easier to work with large volumes of data across on-premises and cloud environments.

In Microsoft Azure Data Factory, pipeline is a set of activities that run in a specific sequence or in parallel to process data. Each pipeline can have parameters, triggers, and can be scheduled or executed on demand.

Microsoft Azure Data Factory provides a data integration and transformation layer that works across your digital transformation initiatives.

Figure 1 : Data integration and transformation

Why Monitor Microsoft Azure Data Factory?

Monitoring Microsoft Azure Data Factory helps ensure that pipelines and individual activities (like data movement, transformation, and orchestration) perform as expected. Monitoring Microsoft Azure Data Factory helps the administrators to ensure health of data pipeline, detect failures, delays, or bottlenecks in the pipeline execution and identify slow-running pipelines or activities. This allows them to optimize performance, resource usage, and keep track of how efficiently resources are being utilized for pipeline execution, ensuring data security/compliance. For obtaining focused metrics on overall service performance and resource usage, Microsoft Azure Data Factory should be monitored.