Enhance your Azure visualizations using Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana
In line with our commitment to open-source solutions, we are announcing the public preview of Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana. This service offers a powerful solution for cloud-native monitoring and visualizing Prometheus metrics. 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. Start quickly with pre-built and community dashboards Pre-built Grafana dashboards for Azure Kubernetes Services, Azure Monitor, 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 Prometheus and Azure Monitor data sources. Built-in Grafana controls and capabilities allow you to apply a wide range of visualization panels and client-side transformations to Azure monitoring data to create custom dashboards. Flexibility with open-source dashboards 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. Teams that create and author Grafana dashboards can share and re-use dashboards in Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana, Azure Managed Grafana, self-hosted Grafana and more. Manage dashboards with Azure Role Based Access Control (RBAC) Dashboards with Grafana are native Azure resources supporting Azure RBAC to assign permissions, and automation via ARM and Bicep templates. The ability to view dashboards and data solely depends on users’ permissions on both the dashboard and the underlying data source being viewed. Supported Scenarios Dashboards with Grafana include Azure data sources only, starting with Azure Monitor metrics, logs, traces, alerts, Azure Resource Graph, and Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus metrics. Support for Grafana Explore and Exemplars will be available in future releases. When to use 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 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.
Public Preview: Metrics usage insights for Azure Monitor Workspace
As organizations expand their services and applications, reliability and high availability are a top priority to ensure they provide a high level of quality to their customers. As the complexity of these services and applications grows, organizations continue to collect more telemetry to ensure higher observability. However, many are facing a common challenge: increasing costs driven by the ever-growing volume of telemetry data. Over time, as products grow and evolve, not all telemetry remains valuable. In fact, over instrumentation can create unnecessary noise, generating data that contributes to higher costs without delivering actionable insights. In a time where every team is being asked to do more with less, identifying which telemetry streams truly matter has become essential. To address this need we are announcing the Public Preview of ‘metrics usage insights’, a feature currently designed for Azure Managed Prometheus users which will analyze all metrics ingested in Azure Managed Workspace (AMW), surfacing actionable insights to optimize your observability setup. Metrics usage insights is built to empower teams with the visibility and tools the organizations need to manage observability costs effectively. It empowers customers to pinpoint metrics that align with their business objectives, uncover areas of unnecessary spend by identifying unused metrics, and sustain a streamlined, cost-effective monitoring approach. Metrics usage insights sends usage data to a Log Analytics Workspace (LAW) for analysis. This is a free offering, and there is no charge associated for the data sent to the Log Analytics workspace, storage or queries. Customers will be guided to enable the feature as part of the standard out of the box experience during new AMW resource creation. For existing AMWs this can be configured using diagnostic settings. Key Features 1.Understanding Limits and Quotas for Effective Resource Management Monitoring limits and quotas is crucial for system performance and resource optimization. Tracking usage aids in efficient scaling and cost avoidance. Metrics usage insights provides tools to monitor thresholds, resolve throttling, and ensure cost-effective operations without the need for creating support incidents. 2.Workspace Exploration This experience lets customers explore their AMW data and gain insights. It provides a detailed analysis of data points and samples ingested for billing, both at metric and workspace levels. Customers can evaluate individual metrics by examining their quantity, ingestion volume, and financial impact. 3.Identifying and Removing Unused Metrics The metrics usage insights feature helps identify underutilized metrics that are being ingested, but not used through dashboards, monitors, and API calls. Users facing high storage and ingestion costs can use this feature to delete unused metrics to optimize high-cost metrics, and reclaim capacity. Enable metrics usage insights To enable metrics usage insights, you create a diagnostic setting, which instructs the AMW to send data supporting the insights queries and workbooks to a Log Analytics Workspace (LAW). You'll be prompted to enable it automatically when you create a new Azure Monitor workspace. You can enable it later for an existing Azure Monitor workspace. Read MoreIntroducing Query editor: Empowering Users with PromQL in Azure Monitor Metrics!
We're thrilled to announce the public preview launch of Query Editor in Azure Monitor Metrics, an advanced feature that allows customers to query and write PromQL queries directly within their Azure Monitor workspace (AMW). This long-awaited addition comes as a direct response to the growing demand from our customers, and we're excited to finally deliver this capability to you. What’s new? Unlocking the Power of PromQL: Prometheus Query Language (PromQL) has emerged as a standard in the realm of monitoring and observability, offering users flexibility and expressiveness in querying metric data. With the Query Editor in Azure Monitor Metrics, users can now harness the full potential of PromQL to derive actionable insights for their resources. Previously, users in the Azure portal were unable to query their Prometheus metrics on AKS or Arc-enabled clusters sent to Azure Monitor Workspace via Azure Managed Prometheus in the portal. With this new capability, users can now query Prometheus metrics for their AKS resource or Arc-enabled clusters directly in the Query editor within the portal. Seamless Querying Experience: With the Query Editor, users can compose and execute PromQL queries directly within their Azure Monitor workspace that they are emitting metrics to. This streamlines the monitoring workflow, enabling users to stay focused and productive without the hassle of context switching while querying different types of metric data. Benefits of Query editor with PromQL: Rich Query Language: PromQL offers a rich set of functions and operators for querying metric data, allowing users to perform complex aggregations, transformations, and calculations with ease. Familiarity and Interoperability: For users familiar with Prometheus-based monitoring solutions, the Query Editor provides a familiar environment for querying Azure metrics, facilitating a smoother transition and interoperability between platforms. How it works? Using the Query Editor is simple. Just navigate to your Azure Monitor workspace (AMW), select the Azure Monitor Metrics Query Editor, and start writing your PromQL queries. Get Started Today: The public preview of Query Editor in Azure Monitor Metrics is now available, and we invite you to try it out and share your feedback with us. Your input is invaluable as we continue to refine and improve this feature to better serve your monitoring and analytics needs. Please note, currently, the Query editor only supports querying metrics stored in an Azure Monitor Workspace. We plan to offer future support for platform metrics. https://aka.ms/queryEditorPreview https://learn.microsoft.com/en-Us/azure/azure-monitor/essentials/azure-monitor-workspace-overview?tabs=azure-portal Stay tuned for more updates and enhancements as we work towards delivering even more value to our valued Azure customers.
Public Preview: The New AKS Monitoring Experience
We're excited to announce the public preview of our enhanced Monitoring experience for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). This redesign of the existing Insights experience brings comprehensive monitoring capabilities into a single, streamlined view, addressing some of the most common challenges users face when managing their AKS clusters. Our new Monitoring experience provides both basic (free) and detailed insights (with enabled Prometheus metrics and logging), offering a unified, single-pane-of-glass experience. The basic experience is available for all AKS users with no configuration required at all. A significant benefit of this new experience is in diagnosing pod deployment failures. In the past, identifying pending or failed pods could be a cumbersome process. With the new KPI Card for Pod Status, you can now quickly pinpoint and address these issues before they escalate, ensuring smoother deployments and reduced downtime. Another key scenario where this enhanced view shines is investigating node resource issues. Understanding node readiness and capacity is crucial for efficient cluster management. The Node Readiness Status card, along with detailed CPU and memory usage metrics, provides clear insights into whether your nodes are fully prepared to host pods. This helps prevent resource bottlenecks and optimizes the overall performance of your cluster. Ensuring cluster health during a scaling operation has never been easier. The new Summary Card for Events helps you monitor Kubernetes warning events and pending pod states, making it simple to track and respond to spikes. This ensures your cluster scales smoothly and efficiently, without unexpected hitches that could disrupt your services. Additionally, troubleshooting latency and connectivity issues in AKS is now more straightforward. With enhanced insights into node saturation metrics, including VMSS OS Disk Bandwidth and IOPS consumption, you can quickly identify and resolve issues causing latency. Detailed ETCD monitoring and Load Balancer metrics, such as % SNAT Port Usage, provide critical data to maintain optimal cluster performance, keeping your applications running smoothly. The following comparison table highlights what data comes out of the box for free for ALL AKS users. When you upgrade, you get all the same data collected in the newer Prometheus format as well as access to more rich metrics and logs for your core troubleshooting scenarios. Basic tier metrics Additional metrics in upgraded experience Alert summary card Historical Kubernetes events (30 days) Events summary card Warning events by reason Pod status KPI card Namespace CPU and memory % Node status KPI card Container logs by volume Node CPU and memory % Top five controllers by logs volume VMSS OS disk bandwidth consumed % (max) Packets dropped I/O VMSS OS disk IOPS consumed % (max) Load balancer SNAT port usage We’re committed to providing you with the tools you need to manage and optimize your AKS clusters effectively. Explore the new Monitoring experience in the Azure portal today and experience the future of AKS monitoring!
