Protect your organization’s growth by using Azure Metrics Advisor

As more and more companies are embracing digital transformation to understand the performance of their organizations, services, and equipment, huge amounts of time series data are collected. Making use of that data effectively to help with the decision-making processes is a key problem to be solved. Azure Metrics Advisor, which is built on top of the Anomaly Detector API, is designed to solve that.

We are excited to announce the GA release of Azure Metrics Advisor! As of now, the service is available in all Azure hero regions. The GA version of Azure Metrics Advisor offers several key updates that we’ll dive into below.

What’s new

Enhanced metric onboarding experience with robust verification and step-by-step guidance

By introducing this upgrade, we’ve improved guidance on how to write a valid query and get the metric data prepared as the expected schema, we’ve also optimized the onboarding flow and enhanced the verification process. This could help distinguish issues on different stages and show an intuitive error message to the customer to resolve accordingly. Also, a step-by-step tutorial is added to the document of Metrics Advisor, which elaborates the things to be noticed and several sample queries.

Simplified diagnostic flow to focusing on finding root cause on current incident

Root cause analysis capability is one of the key differentiators of Metrics Advisor. At the preview stage, a bunch of features was offered to help customers perform the analysis manually.

Within this new version, the diagnostic experience has been upgraded to be more automatic. And diagnostic flow is converged into two major steps: one is analyzing root cause into specific dimensions using the diagnostic tree, then to find related anomalies across metrics within the pre-configured “Metrics graph”. This upgrade consolidates a standard diagnostic flow that we learned from the latest customer engagement and best practices.

New notification channel through Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams has been adopted as the major tool to communicate with colleagues and also collaborate on daily work by many organizations. It’s a meaningful experience to get Metrics Advisor to hook up with Microsoft Teams to provide near real-time notification when there’s an anomaly detected.

It is been enabled through a newly introduced “Teams hook” within Metrics Advisor. The experience is quite simple by using an “Incoming webhook” connector in Teams connector, then get the generated URL configured in “Teams hook” within Metrics Advisor. Finally, subscribe to the anomalies that you’re interested in, then a notification will be available to the Teams channel.

New data source supported

In GA version, two new data sources are supported: Azure Log Analytics and Azure Event Hubs, which enables customers on AIOps and IoT monitoring scenario to onboard their metric data easily and directly.

Azure Log Analytics has consolidated data from different sources such as platform logs from Azure services, log and performance data from virtual machines agents, and usage and performance data from applications into a single workspace. By onboarding the metrics to Metrics Advisor, those operation metrics could be monitored effectively and eventually gain a better service performance.

Azure Event Hubs is widely used in IoT scenarios and good at real-time data ingestion. By supporting this source, the smallest granularity of metric data is supported at 60 seconds.

Customer endorsement

Samsung wants to keep customers informed and entertained, so the company works to make sure that its popular Smart TV service stays up and running. To do this, it tracks a wide range of metrics from numerous data sources. Samsung used a rule-based system for anomaly detection, but this solution was limited by the complex environment, and it generated many false positives. The company deployed Microsoft Azure Metrics Advisor in China, and now it can perform root cause analysis within minutes of an alert being triggered. The move to proactive metric monitoring and diagnosis with Metrics Advisor helps staff devote more time to intervention and, ultimately, to customer happiness. Read more at Microsoft Customer Story-Samsung resolves anomalies faster with Azure Metrics Advisor, keeps Smart TV service humming.

Get started today

Go to Azure portal to create your new Metrics Advisor resource at here. Read Metrics Advisor document to learn more about the service capability and the scenario that can be applied.

For more information

Metrics Advisor GA Build announcement:

• https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/harness-the-power-of-data-and-ai-in-your-applications-with-azure/
• https://www.crn.com/slide-shows/cloud/15-big-azure-announcements-made-at-microsoft-build-2021/2
• https://www.octaviantg.com/blog/azure-applied-ai-services
• https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/azure-applied-ai-services-accelerate-ai-solution-development-to-help-businesses-soar/