Troubleshoot with OTLP signals in Azure Monitor (Limited Public Preview)

As organizations increasingly rely on distributed cloud-native applications, the need for comprehensive standards-based observability has never been greater. OpenTelemetry (OTel) has emerged as the industry standard for collecting and transmitting telemetry data, enabling unified monitoring across diverse platforms and services. Microsoft is among the top contributors to OpenTelemetry. Azure Monitor is expanding its support for the OTel standard with this preview, empowering developers and operations teams to seamlessly capture, analyze, and act on critical signals from their applications and infrastructure.

With this limited preview (sign-up here), regardless of where your applications are running, you can channel the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) logs, metrics and traces to Azure Monitor directly. On Azure compute platforms, we have simpler collection orchestration that also unifies application and infrastructure telemetry collection with the Azure Monitor collection offerings for VM/VMSS or AKS.

• On Azure VMs/VMSS (or any Azure Arc supported compute), you can use the Azure Monitor Agent (AMA) that you are already using to collect infrastructure logs.
• On AKS, the Azure Monitor add-ons that orchestrate Container Insights and managed Prometheus, will also auto configure the collection of OTLP signals from your applications (or auto-instrument with Azure Monitor OTel Distro for supported languages).

 On these platforms or anywhere else, you can choose to use OpenTelemetry Collector, and channel the OTLP signals from your OTel SDK instrumented application directly to Azure Monitor cloud ingestion endpoints.

Collect OTLP signals easily with ambient agent/add-on from Azure computes, or use your own OTel Collector to channel OTLP signals into Azure Monitor for rich troubleshooting experiences

OTLP metrics will be stored in Azure Monitor Workspace, a Prometheus metrics store. Logs and traces will be stored in Azure Monitor Log Analytics Workspace in an OTel semantic conventions-based schema. Application Insights experiences will light up, enabling all distributed tracing and troubleshooting experiences powered by Azure Monitor, as well as out of the box Dashboards with Grafana from the community.

With this preview, we are also extending the support for auto-instrumentation of applications on AKS to .NET and Python applications and introducing OTLP metrics collection from all auto-instrumented applications (Java/Node/.NET/Python).

Sign-up for the preview here: https://aka.ms/azuremonitorotelpreview.