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.
Announcing the Public Preview of Azure Monitor health models
Troubleshooting modern cloud-native workloads has become increasingly complex. As applications scale across distributed services and regions, pinpointing the root cause of performance degradation or outages often requires navigating a maze of disconnected signals, metrics, and alerts. This fragmented experience slows down troubleshooting and burdens engineering teams with manual correlation work. We address these challenges by introducing a unified, intelligent concept of workload health that’s enriched with application context. Health models streamline how you monitor, assess, and respond to issues affecting your workloads. Built on Azure service groups, they provide an out-of-the-box model tailored to your environment, consolidate signals to reduce alert noise, and surface actionable insights — all designed to accelerate detection, diagnosis, and resolution across your Azure landscape. Overview Azure Monitor health models enable customers to monitor the health of their applications with ease and confidence. These models use the Azure-wide workload concept of service groups to infer the scope of workloads and provide out-of-the-box health criteria based on platform metrics for Azure resources. Key Capabilities Out-of-the-Box Health Model Customers often struggle with defining and monitoring the health of their workloads due to the variability of metrics across different Azure resources. Azure Monitor health models provide a simplified out-of-the-box health experience built using Azure service group membership. Customers can define the scope of their workload using service groups and receive default health criteria based on platform metrics. This includes recommended alert rules for various Azure resources, ensuring comprehensive monitoring coverage. Improved Detection of Workload Issues Isolating the root cause of workload issues can be time-consuming and challenging, especially when dealing with multiple signals from various resources. The health model aggregates health signals across the model to generate a single health notification, helping customers isolate the type of signal that became unhealthy. This enables quick identification of whether the issue is related to backend services or user-centric signals. Quick Impact Assessment Assessing the impact of workload issues across different regions and resources can be complex and slow, leading to delayed responses and prolonged downtime. The health model provides insights into which Azure resources or components have become unhealthy, which regions are affected, and the duration of the impact based on health history. This allows customers to quickly assess the scope and severity of issues within the workload. Localize the Issue Identifying the specific signals and resources that triggered a health state change can be difficult, leading to inefficient troubleshooting and resolution processes. Health models inform customers which signals triggered the health state change, and which service group members were affected. This enables quick isolation of the trouble source and notifies the relevant team, streamlining the troubleshooting process. Customizable Health Criteria for Bespoke Workloads Many organizations operate complex, bespoke workloads that require their own specific health definitions. Relying solely on default platform metrics can lead to blind spots or false positives, making it difficult to accurately assess the true health of these custom applications. Azure Monitor health models allow customers to tailor health assessments by adding custom health signals. These signals can be sourced from Azure Monitor data such as Application Insights, Managed Prometheus, and Log Analytics. This flexibility empowers teams to tune the health model to reflect the unique characteristics and performance indicators of their workloads, ensuring more precise and actionable health insights. Getting Started Ready to simplify and accelerate how you monitor the health of your workloads? Getting started with Azure Monitor health models is easy — and during the public preview, it’s completely free to use. Pricing details will be shared ahead of general availability (GA), so you can plan with confidence. Start Monitoring in Minutes Define Your Service Group Create your service group and add the relevant resources as members to the service group. If you don’t yet have access to service groups, you can join here. Create Your Health Model In the Azure Portal navigate to Health Models and create your first model. You’ll get out-of-the-box health criteria automatically applied. Customize to Fit Your Needs In many cases the default health signals may suit your needs, but we support customization as well. Investigate and Act Use the health timeline and our alerting integration to quickly assess impact, isolate issues, and take action — all from a single pane of glass. You can access health models today in the Azure portal! For more details on how to get started with health models, please refer to our documentation. We Want to Hear From You Azure Monitor health models are built with our customers in mind — and your feedback is essential to shaping the future of this experience. Whether you're using the out-of-the-box health model or customizing it to fit your unique workloads, we want to know what’s working well and where we can improve. Share Your Feedback Use the “Give Feedback” feature directly within the Azure Monitor health models experience to send us your thoughts in context. Post your ideas in the Azure Monitor community. Prefer email? Reach out to us at azmonhealthmodels@service.microsoft.com — we’re listening. Your insights help us prioritize features, improve usability, and ensure Azure Monitor continues to meet the evolving needs of modern cloud-native operations.How to leverage Azure Monitor to meet functional and non-functional requirements - No.1 overview
Azure Monitor can be used for centralized monitoring and analysis of log data by using Kusto query, thus Azure Monitor allows you to effectively monitor and visualize Azure resources. Azure Arc also empowers Azure Monitor to expand its capability to on-premise and other public clouds. You can monitor every resources across environments, Azure, AWS, GCP, OCI, on-premise and others, with Azure Monitor and Azure Arc, then Azure Monitor minimize your effort to manage all the resources regardless locations or environments. Azure Monitor is a very powerful solution, but customers and partners sometimes have a challenge to map Azure Monitor features to their functional and non-functional requirements. These series articles describe how to use various Azure Monitor features in terms of functional and non-functional requirements. This article answers how to meet the requirements by using Azure Monitor.
Public Preview: Smarter Troubleshooting in Azure Monitor with AI-powered Investigation
Investigate smarter – click, analyze, and easily mitigate with Azure Monitor investigations! We are excited to introduce the public preview of Azure Monitor issue and investigation. These new capabilities are designed to enhance your troubleshooting experience and streamline the process of resolving health degradations in your application and infrastructure.Troubleshoot with OpenTelemetry in Azure Monitor - Public Preview
OpenTelemetry is fast becoming the industry standard for modern telemetry collection and ingestion pipelines. With Azure Monitor’s new OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) support, you can ship logs, metrics, and traces from wherever you run workloads to analyze and act on your observability data in one place. What’s in the preview Direct OTLP ingestion into Azure Monitor for logs, metrics, and traces. Automated onboarding for AKS workloads. Application Insights on OTLP for distributed tracing, performance and troubleshooting experiences. Pre-built Grafana dashboards to visualize signals quickly. Prometheus for metric storage and query. OpenTelemetry semantic conventions for logs and traces, so your data lands in a familiar standard-based schema. How to send OTLP to Azure Monitor: pick your path AKS: Auto-instrument Java and Node.js workloads using the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry distro, or auto-configure any OpenTelemetry SDK-instrumented workload to export OTLP to Azure Monitor. Get started Limited preview: Auto-instrumentation for .NET and Python is also available. Get started VMs/VM Scale Sets (and Azure Arc-enabled compute): Use the Azure Monitor Agent (AMA) to receive OTLP from your apps and export it to Azure Monitor. Get started Any environment: Use the OpenTelemetry Collector to receive OTLP signals and export directly to Azure Monitor cloud ingestion endpoints. Get started Under the hood: where your telemetry lands Metrics: Stored in an Azure Monitor Workspace, a Prometheus metrics store. Logs + traces: Stored in a Log Analytics workspace using an OpenTelemetry semantic conventions–based schema. Troubleshooting: Application Insights lights up distributed tracing and end-to-end performance investigations, backed by Azure Monitor. Why it matters Standardize once: Instrument with OpenTelemetry and keep your telemetry portable. Reduce overhead: Fewer bespoke exporters and pipelines to maintain. Debug faster: Correlate metrics, logs, and traces to get from alert to root cause with less guesswork. Observe with confidence: Use dashboards and tracing views that are ready on day one. Next step: Try the OTLP preview in your environment, then validate end-to-end signal flow with Application Insights and Grafana dashboards. Learn MoreGeneral Availability: Granular RBAC in Azure Monitor Logs
We’re excited to announce the general availability of Granular Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in Azure Monitor Logs! This capability enables you to set fine-grained data access control at the row level, giving you more flexibility and security when managing log data. Back in May 2025, we introduced this feature in public preview. Today, it’s fully available and ready for production use What is Granular RBAC? Organizations often need to segregate and control access to data without trading off the benefits of a centralized logging platform. Granular RBAC builds on existing Azure RBAC capabilities for workspace and table-level access, allowing you to: Apply least privilege access at any level, workspace, table, or row level security. Maintain all your data in a single Log Analytics workspace. Separate data plane and control plane access using Azure Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) as part of your RBAC role assignments. With Granular RBAC, you can filter which data each user can view or query based on conditions you define such as organizational roles, geographic regions, or data sensitivity levels. What’s New? Broad Availability: Granular RBAC is now supported in Azure Public Cloud, Azure Government (GCC), and Azure China. New Built-in Role: The Log Analytics Data Reader role now fully supports Granular RBAC for an out-of-the-box experience. Learn more Get Started Learn more about Granular RBAC and how to set it up in Azure Monitor Logs We hope you enjoy this new addition to Azure Monitor Log Analytics.
Advancing Full-Stack Observability with Azure Monitor at Ignite 2025
New AI-powered innovations in the observability space First, we’re excited to usher in the era of agentic cloud operations with Azure Copilot agents. At Ignite 2025, we are announcing the preview of the Azure Copilot observability agent to help you enhance full-stack troubleshooting. Formerly “Azure Monitor investigate”, the observability agent streamlines troubleshooting across application services and resources such as AKS and VMs with advanced root cause analysis in alerts, the portal, and Azure Copilot (gated preview). By automatically correlating telemetry across resources and surfacing actionable findings, it empowers teams to resolve issues faster, gain deeper visibility, and collaborate effectively. Learn more here about the observability agent and learn about additional agents in Azure Copilot here. Additionally, with the new Azure Copilot, we are streamlining agentic experiences across Azure. From operations center in the Azure portal, you can get a single view to navigate, operate and optimize your environments and invoke agents in your workflows. You also get suggested top actions within the observability blade of operations center to prioritize, diagnose and resolve issues with support from the observability agent. Learn more here. In the era of AI, more and more apps are now AI apps. That’s why we’re enhancing our observability capabilities for GenAI and agents: Azure Monitor brings agent-level visibility and control into a single experience in partnership with Observability in Foundry Control Plane through a new agent details view (public preview) showcasing success metrics, quality indicators, safety checks, and cost insights in one place. Simplified tracing also transforms every agent run into a reasonable, plan-and-act narrative for faster understanding. On top of these features, the new smart trace search enables faster detection of anomalies—such as policy violations, unexpected cost spikes, or model regressions—so teams can troubleshoot and optimize with confidence. These new agentic experiences build upon a solid observability foundation provided by Azure Monitor. Learn more here. We’re making several additional improvements in Azure Monitor: Simplified Onboarding & More Centralized Visibility Streamlined onboarding: Azure Monitor now offers streamlined onboarding for VMs, containers, and applications with sensible defaults and abstraction layers. This means ITOps teams can enable monitoring across environments in minutes, not hours. Previously, configuring DCRs and linking Log Analytics workspaces was a multi-step process; now, you can apply predefined templates and scale monitoring across hundreds of VMs faster than before. Centralized dashboards: A new monitor overview page in operations center consolidates top suggested actions and Azure Copilot-driven workflows for rapid investigation. Paired with the new monitoring coverage page (public preview) in Azure Monitor, ITOps can quickly identify gaps based on Azure Advisor recommendations, enable VM Insights and Container Insights at scale, and act on monitoring recommendations—all from a single pane of glass. Learn more here. Richer visualizations: Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana are now in GA, delivering rich visualizations and data transformation capabilities on Prometheus metrics, Azure resource metrics, and more. Learn more here. Cloud to edge visibility: With expanded support for Arc-enabled Kubernetes with OpenShift and Azure Red Hat OpenShift in Container Insights and Managed Prometheus, Azure Monitor offers an even more complete set of services for monitoring the health and performance of different layers of Kubernetes infrastructure and the applications that depend on it. Learn more here. Advanced Logs, Metrics, and Alert Management Logs & metrics innovations: Azure Monitor now supports the log filtering and transformation (GA), as well as the emission of logs to additional destinations (public preview) such as Azure Data Explorer and Fabric—unlocking real-time analytics and more seamless data control. Learn more here. More granular access for managing logs: Granular RBAC for Log Analytics workspaces ensures compliance and least privilege principles across teams, now in general availability. Learn more here. Dynamic thresholds for log search alerts (public preview): Now you can apply the advanced machine learning methods of dynamic threshold calculations to enhance monitoring with log search alerts. Learn more here. Query-based metric alerts (public preview): Get rich and flexible query-based alerting on Prometheus, VM Guest OS, and custom OTel metrics to reduce complexity and unblock advanced alerting scenarios. Learn more here. OpenTelemetry Ecosystem Expansion Azure Monitor doubles down on our commitment to OpenTelemetry with expanded support for monitoring applications deployed to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) by using OTLP for instrumentation and data collection. New capabilities include: Auto-instrumentation with the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry distro for Java and NodeJS apps on AKS (public preview): this reduces friction for teams adopting OTel standards and ensures consistent telemetry across diverse compute environments. Auto-configuration for apps on AKS in any language already instrumented with the open-source OpenTelemetry SDK to emit telemetry to Azure Monitor. Learn more here. Additionally, we are making it easier to gain richer and more consistent visibility across Azure VMs and Arc Servers with OpenTelemetry visualizations, offering standardized system metrics, per-process insights, and extensibility to popular workloads on a more cost-efficient and performant solution. Learn more here. Next Steps These innovations redefine observability from cloud to edge—simplifying onboarding, accelerating troubleshooting, and embracing open standards. For ITOps and DevOps teams, this means fewer blind spots, faster MTTR, and improved operational resilience. Whether you’re joining us at Microsoft Ignite 2025 in-person or online, there are plenty of ways to connect with the Azure Monitor team and learn more: Attend breakout session BRK149 for a deep dive into Azure Monitor’s observability capabilities and best practices for optimizing cloud resources. Attend breakout session BRK145 to learn more about how agentic AI can help you streamline cloud operations and management. Attend breakout session BRK190 to learn about how Azure Monitor and Microsoft Foundry deliver an end-to-end observability experience for your AI apps and agents. Join theater demo THR735 to see a live demo on monitoring AI agents in production. Connect with Microsoft experts at the Azure Copilot, Operations, and Management expert meet-up booth to get your questions answered.Announcing General Availability: Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana
Continuing our commitment to open-source solutions, we are announcing the general availability of Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana. This service offers a powerful solution for cloud-native monitoring and visualizing all your Azure data. Dashboards with Grafana enable you to create and edit Grafana dashboards directly in the Azure portal without additional cost and less administrative overhead compared to self-hosting Grafana or using managed Grafana services. Built-in Grafana controls and components allow you to apply a rich set of visualization panels and client-side transformations to Azure monitoring data to create custom dashboards. Start quickly with pre-built and community dashboards Dozens of pre-built Grafana dashboards for Azure Kubernetes Services, Application Insights, Storage Accounts, Cosmos DB, Azure PostgreSQL, OpenTelemetry metrics and dozens of other Azure resources are included and enabled by default. Additionally, you can import dashboards from thousands of publicly available Grafana community and open-source dashboards for the supported data sources: Prometheus, Azure Monitor (metrics, logs, traces, Azure Resource Graph), and Azure Data Explorer. Streamline monitoring with open-source compatibility and Azure enterprise capabilities Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana are fully compatible with open-source Grafana dashboards and are portable across any Grafana instances regardless of where they are hosted. Furthermore, dashboards are native Azure resources supporting Azure RBAC to assign permissions, and automation via ARM and Bicep templates. Import, edit and create dashboards in 30+ Azure regions Choose from any language in the Azure Portal for your Grafana user interface Manage dashboard content as part of the ARM resource Automatically generate ARM templates to automate deployment and manage dashboards Take advantage of Grafana Explore and New Dashboards Leverage Grafana Explore to quickly create ad-hoc queries without modifying dashboards and add queries and visualizations to new or existing dashboards New out of the box dashboards for additional Azure resources: Additional Azure Kubernetes Service support including AKS Automatic and AKS Arc connected clusters Azure Container Apps monitoring dashboards Microsoft Foundry monitoring dashboards Azure Monitor Application Insights dashboards OpenTelemetry metrics Microsoft Agent Framework High Performance Computing dashboards with dedicated GPU monitoring When to step up to Azure Managed Grafana? If you store your telemetry data in Azure, Dashboards with Grafana in the Azure portal is a great way to get started with Grafana. If you have additional 3rd-party data sources, or need full enterprise capabilities in Grafana, you can choose to upgrade to Azure Managed Grafana, a fully managed hosted service for the Grafana Enterprise software. See a detailed solution comparison of Dashboards with Grafana and Azure Managed Grafana here. Get started with Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana today.
