What's new in observability @ Build 2024

Observability and monitoring are essential for building resilient applications across hybrid, multicloud, and edge environments. At Build 2024, we are excited to announce new capabilities for Azure Monitor and cover a deep dive on Azure Chaos Studio. Whether you are a DevOps engineer, developer, or an IT professional, you’ll find something new to help you optimize your application performance and troubleshoot effortlessly.

Here are a few of the key improvements we’re making to Azure Monitor today:

1. Edge observability
2. Enhanced user experience
3. Cost optimization
4. Enterprise enablement

Read on more for more details!

Edge Observability with OpenTelemetry

We are extending our Azure Monitor pipeline capabilities from the cloud to the edge, enabling high-scale data ingestion with centralized configuration management. This solution takes Azure Monitor support for OpenTelemetry further, starting with its OpenTelemetry Distros, and now with Azure Monitor pipeline, which builds on OpenTelemetry Collector and is our first offering that supports OpenTelemetry natively. Going forward, we will be extending this via Azure Monitor Agent and direct cloud ingestion of OTLP signals.  Learn more about how to accelerate your observability journey with Azure Monitor pipeline (public preview) here.

Enhanced User Experience

Modern applications and infrastructure require every user to use Azure Monitor logs in their everyday work. We are transforming the log consumption experience to allow even more users in your organizations easily work with log data to derive insights and consume logs without the need to write queries. We also improved how logs can be explored from Microsoft Copilot in Azure, allowing you to interact with logs using natural language. When working on containers, you can ask Copilot to run queries for you to fetch and analyze the relevant logs you need. Learn more here.

Next, we’re excited to announce new improvements to Application Insights Code Optimizations, based on your feedback. Code Optimizations is an AI-based service that helps you detect and remediate performance issues on a code-level in your running .NET applications. With the latest updates, Code Optimizations recommendations are more deeply integrated with the Performance blade in Application Insights. You can sign up for additional capabilities today, such as Code Optimizations extensions (preview) for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Read more about all the latest improvements.

Finally, we are making it easier for AKS cloud native developers to troubleshoot with…

• Kubernetes Metadata and Logs Filtering: This new feature enhances the ContainerLogsV2 schema with additional Kubernetes metadata such as PodLabels, PodAnnotations, PodUid, Image, ImageID, ImageRepo and ImageTag. The Logs Filtering feature provides filtering capabilities for both workload and platform (i.e. system namespaces) containers. Additionally, Kubernetes Metadata and Logs Filtering supports Grafana dashboard for visualization. With these features, users gain richer context and improved visibility into their workloads. Learn more here.

• Observability for AKS object overviews: AKS portal blades now show observability data powered by Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus. With this, you can view Observability in-context of your Kubernetes objects, detect and troubleshoot issues, and ensure key workloads are running optimally. Learn here.

Cost Optimization

We are committed to helping you get the maximum value out of your logs and select the right type of logs for your data. To do this, we are enabling…

• Azure Advisor recommendations to drive the most cost-effective settings; read more here.
• Managed Prometheus visualizations for Azure Monitor container insights (public preview), an update that will bring first-class support of the managed Prometheus experience to Azure Monitor container Insights. This feature offers the ability to visualize using only managed Prometheus data instead of Log Analytics which will reduce your default monitoring cost and improve loading performance. Learn more here.

Enterprise Enablement

Azure Monitor Logs are deployed today by the most regulated and sensitive organizations. We are committed to helping these organizations use logs throughout their workloads. Today, we announce several key capabilities that will be rolled out over the coming month to support this, including…

• A high-end business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solution called Workspace Replication to provide region failover. Learn more here.
• New SLI metrics that help monitor your Log Analytics Workspaces: it is now easier to examine your workspace ingestion and query in real time. Learn more here.
• Improvements to Log Analytics Dedicated Clusters experience: Dedicated Clusters are important for large scale and regulated customers. They are now easier to control with a new admin UI and lowered entry bar at 100GB/day. Learn more here.

How to engage with us at Build 2024

Attend our breakout session and live demo (in-person only):

• Azure Monitor: Observability from Code to Cloud: an in-depth session on how Azure Monitor delivers comprehensive observability across cloud and edge environments
• Next-gen monitoring on Azure: a demonstration of new cloud-native monitoring capabilities in Azure Monitor and ways to validate your application resilience in Azure Chaos Studio

Watch the following on-demand breakout sessions to learn about the latest updates:

• What’s new in Azure Monitor?: an overview of troubleshooting with Azure Monitor using Prometheus, Grafana, and Application Insights, as well as an update on new features
• Improve Application Resilience using Azure Chaos Studio: an end-to-end presentation about chaos engineering, getting value out of Chaos Studio, and an availability zone down experiment on several virtual machines

We are looking forward to seeing you in-person or online at this year’s event. Continue the conversation here with us in the Observability Tech Community Blog.