The Azure Monitor REST API , hosted behind Azure Resource Manager, is a widely used API service in Azure that allows customers to gain insights into Azure resources. However, customers who leverage this API to query metrics in bulk at high frequency and push metrics to other datastores for the purpose of deep analytics may experience throttling issues with the current API. To address this, and better empower these use cases, Microsoft Azure has introduced the Azure Metrics Data plane API, a new batch API that enables efficient and large-scale queries.
We are excited today to announce the Public Preview of the Azure Metrics Data plane API. This powerful addition allows customers to query metrics for their Azure resources at a large scale.
So, what is Azure Monitor Metrics Data plane API?
Azure Metrics Data plane API is a new paradigm in Azure Monitoring which makes resource insight gathering more efficient with a higher capacity querying experience. It provides the capability to retrieve the metric data for up to 50 resource Ids in the same subscription and region in a single batch API call thus improving query throughput and reducing the risk of throttling.
Here are some of the key features and benefits of Azure Metrics Data plane API -
- Higher Querying Limits: Azure Metrics Data plane API is designed for querying metric data for your resources with higher query limits than existing Azure Resource Manager APIs. This is particularly beneficial for customers who have large subscriptions with multiple resources, as they can query data without worrying about being throttled. Compared to the REST API, which only allows 12,000 API calls per hour, this new API enables you to perform up to 360,000 API calls per hour. This improvement in query throughput provides a more efficient and streamlined experience for customers.
- Efficiency: Collecting metrics for multiple resources in a single API call is more efficient than making multiple API calls for each resource. The Azure Metrics Data plane API offers a single batch API call which can accommodate up to 50 resource IDs, resulting in higher throughput and more efficient querying.
- Improved Performance: The Azure Metrics Data plane API can enhance the performance of client-side services by reducing the number of calls needed to extract the same amount of metric data for resources, resulting in improved performance.
Overall, this API provides a powerful and efficient mechanism for organizations looking to monitor and manage their resources more effectively at a scale. By using this API, organizations can streamline their monitoring processes and improve their infrastructure's overall performance. We look forward to seeing the innovative solutions and exciting use cases that developers and organizations will create using the Azure Metrics Data plane API.
Our API is being used by several customers in Private Preview and here is what some of them have to say about their experience with the Azure Metrics Data plane API:
Customer Quote
“Datadog uses Azure Monitor APIs to ingest metrics on behalf of thousands of organizations, including some of the largest Azure customers in the world. Through our partnership with the Azure Monitor team, we’ve been able to leverage the Data plane API to ingest data with minimal latency, enabling faster alerting and near real-team evaluation of health and performance even for enterprise-scale Azure environments,” says Jimmy Caputo, Director of Product Management at Datadog.”
The new metrics Data plane API will be charged at a rate of $0.01/1000 API calls (Refer to pricing details here- Pricing - Azure Monitor | Microsoft Azure). The service is currently free to use, with billing set to begin on 10/1/2023. Please note current users of the Metrics REST API hosted behind the ARM APIs will see no change in pricing.
Learn more about Azure Metrics Data plane API - Metrics in Azure Monitor - Azure Monitor | Microsoft Learn.