Azure Managed Grafana Brings Grafana 11 and More
We’re thrilled to announce the public preview of Grafana 11 and several feature enhancements in Azure Managed Grafana based on your feedback. We continue to evolve our service to deliver what matters most to our customers. Grafana 11 This annual major update to Grafana includes new functionality and improvements across dashboards, panels, queries, and alerts. The current preview in Managed Grafana offers Grafana v11.2. It includes the following key features: Explore Metrics Scenes powered dashboards Subfolders Numerous improvements to canvas visualization and alerting For more information on Grafana 11, please refer What’s new in Grafana v11.0, v11.1, and v11.2 and consider how the breaking changes may impact your specific use cases. You’ll need to create a new Managed Grafana instance to use Grafana 11 preview. Upgrading from Grafana 10 directly isn’t supported yet. You can copy over dashboards from your current Managed Grafana instance by following the steps in Migrate to Azure Managed Grafana. Please note that not all Grafana 11 features are available in Managed Grafana at present; if applicable, more features will be added over time. Azure Monitor Updates for Grafana 11 Improved Azure Monitor Logs visualizations This update extends Azure Monitor logs visualizations to support Basic Logs. This enables you to view Azure Monitor Log tables that have been configured with the lower cost Basic Log tier in Explore and dashboard panels. Additionally, Azure Monitor Logs details can now be viewed in Grafana Explore and Logs panels. You can filter query results by column values, run ad-hoc statistics and choose which column to display using simple point and click interaction without needing to modify the query text. Explore views also include options to view JSON data in dynamic columns. Azure Kubernetes Service users can leverage these views in a new Container Log dashboard. Prometheus Exemplars support for Azure Monitor Application Insight traces You can now drill down from Prometheus exemplars to Application Insights traces in Grafana. Using Exemplars in your troubleshooting workflow improves triage and analysis response times by allowing you to navigate from metrics to sample traces related to errors and exceptions and easily compare performance of transactions. To take advantage of this capability, the application needs to be instrumented to emit Prometheus metrics with Exemplars and traces to Azure Monitor Application Insights. Sign up for the Private Preview of Exemplars support in your Azure Monitor Workspace. User-Assigned Managed Identity Since its inception, Managed Grafana sets up a system-assigned managed identity for a new Grafana workspace by default. You can use this managed identity as the security principal to access backend data sources connected to your workspace. While it’s convenient to use, system-assigned managed identity isn’t always suitable. Enterprise customers who have stricter identity management policies typically create and manage all Entra ID identities by themselves. Managed Grafana now allows these customers to use identities defined in their Entra ID tenants instead. With the user-assigned managed identity feature, you can select an existing Entra ID identity to be used for authentication and authorization with your data sources. Please note that you can choose only one type of managed identity for each workspace. You can’t enable both system-assigned and user-assigned managed identities simultaneously. Grafana Settings Grafana server settings allow you to customize specific server behaviors. Managed Grafana configures and manages these settings automatically, so you don’t have to deal with them. There are some settings where usage varies from user to user. Managed Grafana now gives you the option to change their default values. The currently supported ones are: viewers_can_edit – determines whether users with the Grafana Viewer role can edit dashboards external_enabled – controls the public sharing of snapshots Grafana Migration Tool If you have a self-hosted Grafana server on-premises or in the cloud that you’d like to migrate to Managed Grafana, you can perform this operation with one command in the Azure CLI. The new az grafana migrate command automates the process of copying your existing dashboards from any Grafana server to your Managed Grafana workspace. It supports several options that control how the content migration should be conducted as well as a dry-run option for you to test and see the migration results before committing to the operation. Let Us Know How We’re Doing If you’re a current user of Managed Grafana, we’d love to hear from you. Please take a moment and fill out this online survey. It will help us further improve our service to better serve you. Thank you!Announcing the Public Preview of Azure Monitor – Network Security Perimeter Features
Azure Monitor services now extend support to Network Security Perimeter (NSP) features, enabling Azure PaaS resources to communicate securely within a trusted boundary. The integration of NSP features in Azure Monitor services enhances security and monitoring capabilities across 6 Azure cloud regions (East US, East US 2, North Central US, South Central US, West US, West US 2).Optimizing Cost using the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro
Immediately after Willow deployed the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro, their Azure Costs spiked, and they approached Azure Monitor Team for strategies to optimize cost. By following the strategies in this blog, they were able to reduce costs by over 90%!Making Azure the Best Place to Observe Your Apps with OpenTelemetry
Our goal is to make Azure the most observable cloud. To that end, we are refactoring Azure’s native observability platform to be based on OpenTelemetry, an industry standard for instrumenting applications and transmitting telemetry.Identify and solve performance issues faster with App Insights Code Optimizations
The integration of Code Optimizations with Microsoft Copilot forAzure and GitHub Copilot enables seamless integration between operations teams identifying performance bottlenecks in running .NET applications on Azure, and developers remediating them faster on code level in Visual Studio Code.Azure Managed Grafana Adds New SKU and Features
At the first anniversary of Azure Managed Grafana general availability, we’re excited to announce the preview of the Essential SKU as well as numerous new functionalities and enhancements. These additions bring more choices and value to our users. Essential SKU We’ve observed that many current users of Managed Grafana exclusively or primarily view data from Azure Monitor services, including the managed service for Prometheus. These users don’t require the full extensibility Grafana provides. We’re introducing a simplified Managed Grafana SKU called Essential that focuses on Azure Monitor dashboarding. Because it consumes less resources, the Essential SKU is more cost-effective than the Standard SKU for development and testing uses. You pay only for active usage based on the number of actual users you have in each calendar month. You can have one Essential SKU workspace per Azure subscription. To create an Essential SKU workspace, choose “Essential” in the Pricing Plans during a new deployment. You may also upgrade an Essential SKU workspace to Standard at a later point, as your needs for Grafana functionality change over time. Grafana Version 10 Users creating new deployments of Azure Managed Grafana Standard SKU can now choose Grafana version 10 for access to a wide range of features and enhancements including time region support and annotation filtering improvements. With this opt in model, you have the flexibility to use a newer Grafana version much earlier than when it becomes mandatory for all Managed Grafana instances. Existing Managed Grafana workspaces running on Grafana version 9 can’t be upgraded in-place to version 10 yet. We’ll announce when it’s supported, once we’ve resolved all the migration issues. Team Sync with Entra Groups Grafana team sync is a Grafana Pro feature that lets you connect teams in Grafana to an external identity provider. You typically set up Grafana teams to manage permissions for accessing Grafana dashboards at a better scale. With regular Grafana teams however, you’ll have to configure and maintain their member lists as a separate task. Managed Grafana utilizes team sync to allow you to define Grafana teams as Entra (formerly, Azure Active Directory) groups. With such functionality, you can manage your groups and memberships centrally and with greater consistency. Plugin Management Until very recently, Managed Grafana packaged and executed all plugins as a part of the Grafana software image that’s deployed to all workspace instances. That approach impacted both the image size and startup time as the number of plugins increases. With plugin management, Managed Grafana pre-installs a smaller set of plugins, and you can add optional plugins to your Grafana workspace after it’s created. Initially only plugins that have been reviewed by the Managed Grafana team are available for installation. Application Insights Traces in Grafana Starting with Grafana 10, Azure Monitor users can now accelerate their application performance triage and troubleshooting workflows by searching, filtering and viewing Application Insights traces natively in Grafana’s trace visualizations and Tracing in Explore. Any application being monitored by Azure Monitor Application Insights stores its logs and traces in an Application Insights resource. Prior to Grafana 10, these application traces could only be queried and searched for as logs, and viewed in Grafana’s standard timeseries and table visualization panels. Search for traces in Azure Monitor query wizard In Grafana 10, users can now filter and isolate traces of interest with the new trace query wizard in Explore or dashboard panels. View Traces After identifying an anomalous trace, users can choose to view trace details directly in Grafana using the split view in Explore or by opening a new tab. Click on the itemId field to view all the spans within the end-to-end trace. View Trace details The selected trace or span opens in Grafana’s dedicated trace viewer where you can use the Gantt chart view to understand the contribution of delays by individual microservices and dependencies. This is a fast and efficient approach to performing root cause of analysis to identify why a specific transaction was slow. Start with new out-of-the-box dashboards To help you get started working with App Insights traces in Grafana, there are now 5 new dashboards that are shipped with the Azure Monitor data source plugin and available for import from Dashboards | Grafana Labs. Each of these dashboards provides a curated experience to triage performance problems or failures and allows users to click on a single operationID to view the trace details. Azure / Insights / Applications - Performance - 1. Operations | Grafana Labs Azure / Insights / Applications - Performance - 2. Dependencies | Grafana Labs Azure / Insights / Applications - Failures - 1. Operations | Grafana Labs Azure / Insights / Applications - Failures - 2. Dependencies | Grafana Labs Azure / Insights / Applications - Failures - 3. Exceptions | Grafana Labs User-Based Authentication for Azure Data Explorer (ADX) Grafana normally uses a special identity (e.g., managed identity or app registration) as the access credential for a data source. The ADX plugin is the first data source plugin to support user-based authentication and to enable end-to-end permission control for the currently signed in user. Most ADX customers have already configured their clusters for user access. The user-based authentication for ADX allows those same settings to be applied to Grafana access to ADX. It not only simplifies the data source access configuration but also makes possible to apply policies (e.g., audit logging) based on who the user is. It’s worth noting that user-based authentication doesn’t work with Grafana automation features, such as alerts or reporting. If you need these features, you’ll have to set up a separate ADX data source with a managed identity or app registration and use that with the features. User Deduplication in Billing One customer pain-point we’ve heard is that Managed Grafana charges for each active user in each workspace. If a user interacts with two workspaces, that user is billed twice. The Managed Grafana service are region based. There is no easy way for it to enumerate all workspaces belonging to a customer. It, however, can do this reliably at the Azure subscription level. Starting with this December’s billing cycle, Managed Grafana will charge each user once based on the first workspace in a subscription they sign into. A user can access any number of Standard SKU workspaces within the same subscription, and they will be counted as one active user for billing purposes. Try Them Out Today With these updates, along with private link and managed private endpoint that we released earlier this year, we hope that Azure Managed Grafana will better meet your visualization needs. Give them a try and leave us a comment to let us know what you think.Running natural language queries against Log analytics using Semantic function
Unlocking the Power of Log Analytics: Run Natural Language Queries with Semantic Functions! In this blog, we will walk throughthe process of creating a semantic function-based solution that can accept a string like "please share all sign-in locations?" and generate a KQL (Kusto Query Language) query. This query will be used to retrieve log analytics data from the signintable.
