A unified monitoring experience for your Kubernetes applications with built-in OpenTelemetry support, seamless UX integration, and OTLP data ingestion into Azure Monitor.
As cloud-native workloads scale, customers increasingly expect application and infrastructure observability to be unified, automated, and devops-friendly. Azure Monitor is advancing this vision with Application Monitoring for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). With seamless onboarding and troubleshooting experiences in the Azure Portal, now in Public Preview.
This new capability brings first-class OpenTelemetry support, seamless onboarding from the AKS cluster blade, and auto-instrumentation and auto-configuration options that make it easier than ever to collect application performance data into Azure Monitor and Application Insights—without modifying application code or maintaining custom agents. Enable application monitoring for your AKS deployed apps directly from the Azure Portal in two steps:
1. Enable application monitoring for the AKS cluster in Monitor Settings
2. Choose the namespaces for application monitoring and configure namespace-wide onboarding to route application signals to an App Insights resource. Optionally, leverage Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) for more granular enablement and per-deployment onboarding.
Feature Highlights
Auto-instrumentation
Auto-instrument Java and NodeJS applications without code changes. This approach instruments workloads with the AzureMonitor OpenTelemetry distro and routes telemetry to Application Insights. Now available in both CLI and Azure portal for addon enablement and namespace configuration.
Unified Monitoring and Troubleshooting
Switch seamlessly between infrastructure and application layers with improved navigation between Container Insights and Application Insights, curated OpenTelemetry workbooks, and Azure-curated Grafana dashboards.
When looking into your deployment controllers from Container Insights, you can also see the application performance metrics alongside to identify problematic requests or failures. From there, you can seamlessly transition over to your Application Insights to get a more detailed diagnosis.
View your application performance next to your infrastructure metrics in Container Insights
Full-Stack Dashboards with Grafana
This new application monitoring capability becomes even more powerful when paired with Dashboards with Grafana for Azure Monitor. With curated, Azure-hosted Grafana dashboards built specifically for Application Insights and OpenTelemetry data, teams can extend their AKS application monitoring experience with rich, full-stack visualizations tailored for cloud-native workloads.
Application monitoring dashboards available through Dashboards with Grafana
These dashboards allow you to:
- Bring application traces, requests, dependencies, and exception data from Application Insights into Grafana dashboards optimized for app-centric troubleshooting.
- Correlate application performance with AKS infrastructure metrics, including node, pod, and container health, to rapidly identify cross-layer issues.
- Visualize OpenTelemetry signals flowing through Azure Monitor in a unified, standards-based format without needing to build dashboards from scratch.
- Customize and extend dashboards with your own OTel metrics or additional Application Insights dimensions for deeper app performance analytics.
By combining Application Monitoring for AKS with Dashboards for Grafana, developers and operators gain a complete, end-to-end view of application behavior, making it faster and easier to diagnose issues, validate deployments, and understand the health of microservices running on AKS.
Call to Action
Start simplifying application observability today with Azure Monitor for AKS.
Unify your metrics, logs, and traces in a single monitoring experience powered by OpenTelemetry and Azure Monitor.
Explore the documentation and get started:
https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/azure-monitor/app/kubernetes-codeless
Learn more about our new features for OpenTelemetry in Azure Monitor:
Microsoft