Azure Monitor vs Azure Security Center: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this Markdown code, we will discuss the key differences between Azure Monitor and Azure Security Center. Azure Monitor is a comprehensive monitoring solution that enables you to collect, analyze, and act on telemetry data from your cloud and on-premises environments. On the other hand, Azure Security Center is a unified security management system that provides advanced threat protection across your hybrid cloud workloads.

1. Scopes: Azure Monitor operates at the resource level, allowing you to monitor individual resources such as virtual machines, databases, or storage accounts. Azure Security Center works at the subscription and resource group level, providing security insights and recommendations for all the resources within the specified scope.

2. Monitoring Focus: Azure Monitor mainly focuses on collecting and analyzing performance and operational data, such as metrics, logs, and traces. It helps you to understand the health and performance of your applications, infrastructure, and network. Azure Security Center, on the other hand, focuses on security-related data, identifying and remediating security vulnerabilities and threats across your resources.

3. Threat Intelligence: Azure Security Center leverages threat intelligence to provide advanced threat protection. It continuously monitors your resources for vulnerabilities, detects potential security threats, and provides recommendations and alerts to help you protect your environment. Azure Monitor does not provide native threat intelligence capabilities.

4. Integration with Security Solutions: Azure Security Center integrates with various security solutions, such as Azure Sentinel, Azure Information Protection, and Azure ATP, to provide enhanced security capabilities. It acts as a central hub for monitoring and managing these security tools. Azure Monitor does not provide direct integration with these security solutions.

5. Compliance and Regulatory Support: Azure Security Center provides compliance and regulatory support by helping you assess your environment against industry best practices and regulatory requirements. It provides security health and compliance recommendations to ensure your resources meet the necessary security standards. Azure Monitor does not offer native compliance and regulatory support.

6. Pricing Model: Azure Monitor has a usage-based pricing model, where you pay for the amount of data collected and the number of monitoring features utilized. Azure Security Center has a tier-based pricing model, with multiple tiers offering different levels of security features and capabilities. The pricing for Azure Security Center is not solely based on data ingestion.

In summary, Azure Monitor focuses on monitoring performance and operational data at the resource level, while Azure Security Center focuses on security-related data at the subscription and resource group level, providing threat protection, compliance support, and integration with security solutions.