Is Your Monitoring Actually Working? What's New in Monitoring Coverage

Monitoring is only useful when the right signals are collected, the right alerts are in place, and the data is actually flowing when teams need it. In large Azure environments, confirming all three across every VM and AKS cluster can still take too much manual work.

At Microsoft Ignite, we introduced Monitoring Coverage in Azure Monitor, a centralized preview experience for finding coverage gaps and enabling recommended VM and container monitoring at scale. At Microsoft Build, we are expanding that experience with two new capabilities that make monitoring easier to operationalize: data flow status and at-scale recommended alert enablement for virtual machines and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

With these updates, teams can move beyond asking whether monitoring was configured. They can see whether recommended monitoring is enabled, whether important alert coverage is missing, and whether configuration issues may prevent monitoring data from reaching its destination.

Monitoring Coverage overview with recommendations and data flow status.

What is Monitoring Coverage?

Monitoring Coverage in Azure Monitor gives you a single place to review recommended monitoring across supported Azure resources. The Overview page summarizes coverage across your selected scope, shows Azure Advisor observability recommendations, and provides quick actions to enable recommended monitoring settings.

Coverage is grouped into basic, partial, and enhanced monitoring so you can quickly understand whether a resource is using only default monitoring or has the Microsoft-recommended configuration enabled. From there, you can drill into the Monitoring Details tab to review individual resources and take action.

New: data flow status

The most important question after enabling monitoring is simple: is the data flowing? Data flow status helps answer that question directly from Monitoring Coverage.

The new data flow status summary shows how many resources need attention, passed initial checks, or are not configured for validation. It also highlights top resources that need attention so operators can start with the most important issues first.

When you open data flow status for a resource, Azure Monitor shows validation checks across areas such as:

• Resource configuration
• Data collection rule associations
• Network connectivity
• Data flows to the configured destination

Detected issues are prioritized at the top of the details pane, and each validation check includes a recommended action. After making a fix, you can run validation again to confirm that data flow issues are resolved.

Data flow status details with validation checks and recommended actions.

Alternatively, you can visualize your data flows and identify problems from there.

New: enable recommended alerts at scale

Monitoring Coverage now also helps close alerting gaps. From the Overview page, you can see recommendations such as Enable VM Recommended Alerts and Enable AKS Recommended Alerts, then select Apply to configure recommended alert rules from a centralized flow.

For virtual machines, you can enable alerts across an entire subscription or choose selected resources. Subscription scope is useful when you want recommended alerts to apply broadly, including to future VMs in the selected subscription. Selected resource scope gives you more granular control when you want to enable alert rules for a specific set of VMs.

The enablement flow lets you review recommended alert rules, adjust thresholds, and configure notification options such as email, Azure Resource Manager role notifications, Azure mobile app notifications, or an existing action group. Some VMs may already have alerts configured, and new rules are designed not to duplicate existing alerts.

For AKS, Monitoring Coverage can surface recommended alert gaps and start the same guided pattern: review impacted resources, configure recommended alert settings, and use Review + Enable to create the alert rules.

VM recommended alert enablement

A resource-centric view for follow-up

The Monitoring Details tab brings coverage and data flow into the same resource list. Two columns are especially useful for triage: Monitoring coverage and Data flow status. Select either value to open resource-level details.

Monitoring coverage details show what is configured for the resource, including VM Insights, recommended alerts, data collection rules, data sources, destinations, and agent version when available. Data flow details show validation results and recommended remediation steps. This makes it easier to move from a high-level gap to the specific resource and configuration that needs attention.

Getting started

Monitoring Coverage is available in preview from the Azure portal. Open Monitor, select Monitoring Coverage (preview), and choose the subscriptions and resources you want to review.

From the Overview page, you can:

• Review coverage across VMs and AKS resources.
• Apply recommendations to enable VM Insights, container monitoring, and recommended alerts.
• Use data flow status to find resources whose monitoring data needs attention.
• Open Monitoring Details for resource-level coverage and validation results.

A few preview notes: enablement operations include up to 100 resources at a time, and enabling monitoring or alert rules may create data collection rules, deploy Azure Monitor Agent, configure destinations, or create alert rules. Data collection, workspace ingestion, and alert rules may incur costs based on the settings you enable.

To learn more, see Monitoring coverage in Azure Monitor (preview).

Looking ahead

Monitoring Coverage is part of our continued work to make Azure Monitor easier to operationalize at scale. We want teams to spend less time hunting for monitoring gaps and more time acting on reliable, validated signals.

We would love your feedback as you try these new Build updates and we look to expand support beyond this set of resource types. Use the Azure portal feedback options or share feedback through your Microsoft account team.