We are excited to announce that Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus now includes native Grafana dashboards within the Azure portal at no additional cost. This integration marks a major milestone in our mission to simplify observability reducing the administrative overhead and complexity compared to deploying and maintaining your own Grafana instances.
The use of open-source observability tools continues to grow for cloud-native scenarios such as application and infrastructure monitoring using Prometheus metrics and OpenTelemetry logs and traces. For these scenarios, DevOps and SRE teams need streamlined and cost-effective access to industry-standard tooling like Prometheus metrics and Grafana dashboards within their cloud-hosted environments.
For many teams, this usually means deploying and managing separate monitoring stacks with some versions self-hosted or partner-managed Prometheus and Grafana. However, Azure Monitor's latest integrations with Grafana provides this capability out-of-the-box by enabling you to view Prometheus metrics and Azure other observability data in Grafana dashboards fully integrated into the Azure portal.
Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana delivers powerful visualization and data transformation capabilities on Prometheus metrics, Azure resource metrics, logs, and traces stored in Azure Monitor. Pre-built dashboards are included for several key scenarios like Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Container Apps, Container Insights, and Application Insights.
Why Grafana in Azure portal?
Grafana dashboards are widely adopted visualization tool used with Prometheus metrics and cloud-native observability tools. Embedding it natively in Azure Portal offers:
- Unified Azure experience: No additional RBAC or network configuration required, users Azure login credentials and Azure RBAC are used to access dashboards and data. View Grafana dashboards alongside all your other Azure resources and Azure Monitor views in the same portal.
- No management overhead or compute costs: Dashboards with Grafana use a fully SaaS model built into Azure Monitor, where you do not have to administer the Grafana server or the compute on which it runs.
- Access to community dashboards: Open-source and Grafana community dashboards using Prometheus or Azure Monitor data sources can be imported with no modifications.
These capabilities mean faster troubleshooting, deeper insights, and a more consistent observability platform for Azure-centric workloads.
Figure 1: Dashboards with Grafana landing page in the context of Azure Monitor Workspace in the Azure portal
Getting Started
To get started, enable Managed Prometheus for your AKS cluster and then navigate to the Azure Monitor workspace or AKS cluster in the Azure portal and select Monitoring > Dashboards with Grafana (preview). From this page you can view, edit, create and import Grafana dashboards. Simply click on one of the pre-built dashboards to get started. You may use these dashboards as they have been provided or edit and add panels, update visualizations and create variables to create your own custom dashboards.
With this approach, no Grafana servers or additional Azure resources need to be provisioned or maintained. Teams can quickly leverage and customize Grafana dashboards within the Azure portal, reducing their deployment and management time while still gaining the benefits of dashboards and visualizations to improve monitoring and troubleshooting times.
Figure 2: Kubernetes Compute Resources dashboard being viewed in the context of Azure Monitor Workspace in the Azure portal
When to upgrade to Azure Managed Grafana?
Dashboards with Grafana in the Azure portal cover most common Prometheus scenarios but, Azure Managed Grafana remains the right choice for several advanced use cases, including:
- Extended data source support for non-Azure data sources e.g. open-source and third-party data stores
- Private networking and advanced authentication options
- Multi-cloud, hybrid and on-premises data source connectivity.
See When to use Azure Managed Grafana for more details.
Get started with Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana today.
Microsoft