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.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 More
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.
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 More
