We are excited to announce the Public Preview 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. Advanced platform metrics add finer-grained signals, helping 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 in Public Preview?
In Public Preview, the following advanced platform metrics are available for Azure Storage across all Azure public cloud regions:
- Container Blob Capacity: The amount of storage used by a specific container in a storage account.
- Container Blob Count: The number of blob objects in a specific container in a storage account.
Pricing and billing
Advanced platform metrics for Azure Monitor are offered as a paid capability during Public Preview. For the latest pricing details, see Azure Monitor pricing.
Getting started
Advanced platform metrics can be enabled per storage account through PowerShell or Azure CLI. For instructions on enabling, managing, and viewing Azure Storage advanced platform metrics, see Azure Platform Metrics for Azure Blob Storage (preview).
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.
Advanced platform metrics in Azure Monitor Metrics Explorer
Users can then select Apply splitting and choose Container name to view metrics for individual containers.
Apply splitting for advanced platform metrics
The chart below shows container-level capacity data for three containers.
Visualization of advanced platform metrics in Azure Monitor Metrics Explorer.Azure Storage scenarios enabled by advanced platform metrics
Standard Azure Monitor platform metrics provide visibility into the storage account as a whole, such as total blob capacity or total object count. With the addition of advanced platform metrics for Azure Storage, customers can understand which individual containers are contributing to growth, object count increases, or operational issues, enabling scenarios such as:
- Cost analysis and internal attribution: In shared storage accounts, identify which containers are consuming the most storage so teams can better understand which applications, environments, or business functions are driving usage without building custom reporting pipelines for this scenario.
- Capacity planning and growth forecasting: Track storage growth at the container level to see which workloads are driving overall account growth and make more informed planning and budgeting decisions.
- Runaway storage growth detection: Quickly isolate individual containers experiencing unexpected increases in capacity or object count, reducing investigation time when usage changes unexpectedly.
What's next?
As the feature moves toward General Availability (GA) and beyond, customers can expect to see more advanced platform metrics for Azure Storage, as well as new advanced platform metrics for other Azure resources. 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 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.
Microsoft