General Availability: Advanced platform metrics in Azure Monitor

We are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of advanced platform metrics for Azure Monitor, delivering more granular telemetry to help customers monitor and optimize their workloads more effectively. This new capability builds on Azure Monitor platform metrics, which continue to provide broad insight into the health, activity, and consumption of Azure resources. These additional signals help customers pinpoint changes and trends within resources more quickly and accurately.

Azure Storage is the first Azure resource to provide advanced platform metrics to customers. Today, Azure Storage users rely on platform metrics to understand overall storage account trends, but this account-level telemetry does not always show what is driving change. For example, a storage account may show steady capacity growth without revealing which specific container is responsible. That growth could be coming from one container used for backups, another storing application logs, or a staging container used by a data pipeline. Advanced platform metrics for Azure Monitor address this scenario by providing container-level visibility, helping customers quickly identify where growth is occurring, investigate unexpected consumption increases, and make more informed cost and capacity planning decisions.

What is available at GA?

Today, the following advanced platform metrics are available for Azure Storage:

• Container Blob Capacity: The amount of storage used by one or more specific containers in a storage account.
• Container Blob Count: The number of blob objects in one or more specific containers in a storage account.

For GA, availability of advanced platform metrics will expand to Fairfax and Mooncake clouds, in addition to all Azure public regions that were supported during the public preview. Advanced platform metrics can also now be discovered, enabled, and exported directly from the Azure portal, making it easier for customers to use the feature and monitor their workloads in greater depth.

Getting Started

Advanced platform metrics can be enabled and configured for each storage account through the Azure portal, Azure CLI, or PowerShell. In the Azure portal, advanced platform metrics can be enabled by navigating to the Advanced platform metrics tab under the Monitoring blade within a storage account.

Enabling advanced platform metrics for a storage account.

For detailed instructions on enabling, managing, and viewing Azure Storage advanced platform metrics, see Azure Platform Metrics for Azure Blob Storage.

After advanced platform metrics are enabled for a storage account, they can be queried, visualized, and used for alerts through the same existing platform metrics experiences. Container Blob Capacity and Container Blob Count will appear in the Metric dropdown menu in Metrics Explorer, alongside all existing Azure Storage platform metrics. Users can then select Apply splitting and choose Container name to view container-level data for individual containers.

Viewing Azure Storage advanced platform metrics in Metrics Explorer.

Azure Storage scenarios enabled by advanced platform metrics

Advanced platform metrics are already helping customers gain deeper insight into their Azure Storage environments. Customers are using container-level visibility to understand which applications and workloads are driving consumption in shared storage accounts, support internal cost attribution, plan for future capacity needs, and investigate unexpected increases in capacity or object count. Instead of relying on custom reporting pipelines to understand container-level usage, teams can use these metrics to more quickly identify where changes are occurring and focus on their investigation.

Pricing and billing

Advanced platform metrics for Azure Monitor are offered as a paid capability. For the latest pricing details, see Azure Monitor pricing.

What's next?

The GA of advanced platform metrics is just the beginning of bringing higher-cardinality metrics to Azure customers. Looking ahead, our roadmap includes the following expansions:

• Azure Storage plans to broaden support for advanced platform metrics, including increased capacity and additional transaction scenarios.
• Additional Azure resource providers will onboard over time, with newly supported metrics documented on the Azure Monitor supported metrics by resource type page.
  • Azure Service Bus and Event Hubs are working to release select subscription and partition-level advanced platform metrics.
• Expansion of feature availability to all supported Azure clouds.

Continue to follow the Azure Observability Blog for the latest updates.

Feedback

We would love to hear your feedback on advanced platform metrics, including how your teams are using the feature to optimize workloads and which additional advanced platform metrics that you would like to see onboarded to Azure Monitor. Please fill out this Azure Monitor advanced platform metrics feedback form, or email advancedplatformmetrics@microsoft.com.