Visualizing data in realtime with Azure Managed Grafana

We’re delighted to announce that Azure Managed Grafana, which has been in public preview since April, is now generally available (GA). It brings the Grafana visualization platform to Azure as a fully managed and highly available service. Azure Managed Grafana enables near realtime data monitoring with rich graphs and alerts specifically designed for Azure data sources. It compliments existing visualization solutions such as Azure Dashboards and Workbooks.

Get started with Azure Managed Grafana

Azure Managed Grafana is operated and supported by Microsoft. Like any 1^st-party Azure service, you can deploy a new Grafana instance (a.k.a., workspace) using the Azure portal, command-line tools, Bicep/ARM templates or control plane APIs.

Create your first Managed Grafana workspace

The easiest way to stand up a Grafana workspace is through the Azure portal. Each instance is regional and, for the current Standard tier, hosted on two dedicated Virtual Machines (VM) to provide better resiliency. These VMs are located in the same datacenter by default; they can be optionally placed in different availability zones using the Zone redundancy feature, for which there is an additional charge.

Connect seamlessly to Azure data sources

Azure Monitor and Azure Data Explorer are two of the most commonly used data stores for operational telemetry and analytics. Azure Managed Grafana supports these data sources out-of-the-box. When it is created, a Grafana workspace is automatically assigned with an Azure Active Directory managed identity, which then is added to the Monitor Reader role on the subscription. This gives you immediate access to Azure Monitor from the new Grafana workspace without needing to set permissions manually.

View your Azure resources with built-in dashboards

Grafana provides a library of pre-built dashboards that you can use as-is or customize further. We included Azure Monitor integrations and several dashboards for popular Azure services in the Managed Grafana public preview:

• Application Insights
• VM Insights
• Container Insights
• Azure Monitor alerts

As a part of the GA release, we’re adding more curated dashboards for Azure services:

• Container Apps

• Spring Apps

• API Management

• Application Insights availability geo map

• Network Insights

These dashboards either are pre-installed in your Managed Grafana workspace or can be downloaded from Azure Monitor Team dashboards.

Easily add log queries and charts from Azure portal to Managed Grafana

The new “pin to Grafana” feature for Azure Monitor Logs allows you to seamlessly add charts and queries from Azure Monitor Logs in the Azure Portal to new or existing Grafana dashboards.  To get started, navigate to Logs for your resource or the relevant Log Analytics workspace in the Azure Portal. Next, create your own query or choose to edit queries from the list of out of the box sample queries. Once your query works as expected, click ‘Pin to’, followed by Grafana dashboard. Then, choose the Grafana workspace and dashboard and click ‘Pin to’ complete the operation.

The query from Azure Monitor Logs is then used to automatically create a new panel in the selected Grafana dashboard.

Test it out today

Give Azure Managed Grafana a try. Get going with this Quickstart and create your first Grafana workspace.