As your application and hosting environment grows, so do your observability needs and the volume of metrics you collect. But understanding what is driving that usage, how it is changing over time, and where there may be opportunities to optimize can be challenging.
We’re excited to announce the general availability of Metrics usage insights for Azure Monitor workspace, an end-to-end insights solution that brings together detailed metrics usage data to give you greater visibility into your metrics footprint and help you better understand, manage, and optimize your usage.
Since public preview, we’ve expanded Metrics usage insights to all public regions where Azure Monitor workspace is generally available and refreshed the dashboard experiences. As part of GA, we’re also introducing the Ingestion Volume Change dashboard to help you investigate how your metrics usage changes over time.
What customers are saying
Customers who have adopted Metrics usage insights have told us that one of the biggest challenges in operating large-scale metrics environments is understanding what's consuming their workspace capacity.
“We have been using this feature for more than a year now on our AMW fleet and it has been really awesome with no apparent issues. The insights around which metrics are the highest consumers of the AMW quota (time series and events) have been super helpful.”
— Microsoft HLS Frontier AI
Metrics usage insights is also helping teams establish stronger operational practices for large Azure Monitor deployments.
"Metric Insights is must-have observability in AKS [Azure Kubernetes Service], everyone needs it."
— Microsoft Observability Common infrastructure (OCI)
This feedback reinforced the importance of making metrics investigations simpler and more actionable and helped shape the continued evolution of the Metrics usage insights experience.
Understand your metrics usage
Metrics usage insights provides a centralized view into the metrics being ingested into your Azure Monitor workspace.
With built-in insights, you can:
- Understand workspace utilization by viewing live active timeseries and event ingestion rates against workspace limits.
- Explore metrics usage to understand timeseries counts, ingestion volume growth, daily trends on a per metric basis.
- Identify unused metrics that haven’t been queried recently and evaluate opportunities to reduce unnecessary ingestion and recuperate costs.
This helps you move beyond simply knowing how much data you’re ingesting to understanding what is contributing to that usage and where you may want to take a closer look.
New since public preview: Investigate changes in ingestion volume
When you see a significant increase or decrease in workspace usage, one of the first questions is often: What changed?
The new Ingestion Volume Change dashboard helps answer that question by letting you compare metrics ingestion between two points in time and identify the metrics contributing to changes across your workspace.
For each metric, you can see changes in:
- Event ingestion rate
- Active time series
- Change in time series or event rates
- Percentage increases or decreases
This makes it easier to identify metrics experiencing significant growth or decline and focus your investigation on the metrics contributing to those changes.
Get started
Metrics usage insights is available directly from your Azure Monitor workspace. You can enable it when creating a new workspace or configure it for an existing workspace using diagnostic settings.
Learn more: Metrics usage insights in Azure Monitor | Microsoft Learn
Microsoft