A Microsoft representative mentioned in conversation that the Azure IaaS cloud VM provides better bang for buck than Amazon Web Services (AWS) when using your own SQL Server licenses.
This article (here) from LogicMonitor provides some interesting performance counters to review to isolate potential SQL Server performance issues. The performance counter charts are from the LogicMonitor monitoring tool, however, the same counters can be captured using your favourite performance counter capture tool.
On numerous occasions I’ve had customers complain about intermittent SQL Server performance only to find that the root cause was not the workload generated by the SQL Server VM but that the VMware environment was oversubscribed and was not providing sufficient CPU resources to the SQL Server when required.