Operator/CRD support with Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus is now Generally Available
We are excited to announce that custom resource definitions (CRD) support with Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus is now generally available. Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus is a component ofAzure Monitor Metrics, allowing you to collect and analyze metrics at scale using a Prometheus-compatible monitoring solution, based on thePrometheusproject from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. This fully managed service enables using thePrometheus query language (PromQL)to analyze and alert on the performance of monitored infrastructure and workloads. What's new? With this new update, customers can customize scraping targets using Custom Resources (Pod Monitors and Service Monitors), similar to the OSS Prometheus Operator. Enabling Managed Prometheus add-on in an AKS cluster will deploy the Pod and Service Monitor custom resource definitions to allow you to create your own custom resources. If you are already using Prometheus Service and Pod monitors to collect metrics from your workloads, you can simply change the apiVersion in the Service/Pod monitor definitions to use them with Azure Managed Prometheus. Earlier, customers who did not have access to kube-system namespace were not able to customize metrics collection. With this update, customers can create custom resources to enable custom configuration of scrape jobs in any namespace. This is especially useful in a multitenancy scenario where customers are running workloads in different namespaces. Note: Support for Custom Resources (Pod Monitors and Service Monitors) is currently not available with Azure Monitor Managed Service for Prometheus for Azure ARC-enabled Kubernetes. Here is how a leading Public Sector Banking and Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) company in India has used Service and Pod monitors custom resources to enable monitoring of GPU metrics with Azure Managed Prometheus, DCGM Exporter, and Azure Managed Grafana. “Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus provides a production-grade solution for monitoring without the hassle of installation and maintenance. By leveraging these managed services, we can focus on extracting insights from your metrics and logs rather than managing the underlying infrastructure. The integration of essential GPU metrics—such as Framebuffer Memory Usage, GPU Utilization, Tensor Core Utilization, and SM Clock Frequencies—into Azure Managed Prometheus and Grafana enhances the visualization of actionable insights. This integration facilitates a comprehensive understanding of GPU consumption patterns, enabling more informed decisions regarding optimization and resource allocation.” -A leading public sector BFSI company in India Get started today! To use CRD support with Azure Managed Prometheus,enable Managed Prometheus add-on on your AKS cluster. This will automatically deploy the custom resource definitions (CRD) for service and pod monitors. To add Prometheus exporters to collect metrics from third-party workloads or other applications, and to see a list of workloads which have curated configurations and instructions, see Integrate common workloads with Azure Managed Prometheus - Azure Monitor | Microsoft Learn. For more details refer to this article, or our documentation. We would love to hear from you - Please share your feedback and suggestions in Azure Monitor · Community.General Availability: Kubernetes Metadata and Logs Filtering in Azure Monitor-Container Insights
Today at Ignite, we are thrilled to announce the General Availability ofKubernetes Metadata and Logs Filtering in Azure Monitor – Container Insights! This enhancement brings additional Kubernetes metadata to the ContainerLogsV2 schema, including PodLabels, PodAnnotations, PodUid, Image, ImageID, ImageRepo, and ImageTag. Moreover, the new Logs Filtering feature allows for precise filtering of both workload and system pods/containers. These advancements not only provide users with richer context and enhanced visibility into their workloads but are crucial for customer troubleshooting as they provide deeper insights into the Kubernetes environment. Key Features Enhanced ContainerLogV2 schema with Kubernetes Metadata Fields: Detailed metadata fields enhance log analysis. These include “podLabels,” “podAnnotations,” “podUid,” “image,” “imageID,” “imageRepo,” and “imageTag.” Customized Include List Configuration: Users can tailor metadata fields via ConfigMap. All fields are collected by default. Enhanced ContainerLogV2 schema with Log Level: Assess application health with color-coded severity levels (e.g., CRITICAL, ERROR, WARNING). Helps incident response and proactive monitoring. Annotation Based Log Filtering for workloads: Efficient log filtering through podAnnotations. Focus on relevant information, optimizing costs and resource usage. ConfigMap Based Log Filtering for platform logs (System Kubernetes Namespaces): Enables ability to configure log collection of specific pods within the system namespaces through ConfigMap. Grafana Dashboard for Visualization: Leverage the power of Grafana Dashboard to visualize log levels, log volume, rate, records, and more. Empowers in-depth analysis and real-time monitoring. To learn more and enable this new feature, please visit our Kubernetes Metadata and Logs Filtering Documentation. If you have any questions or feedback on Kubernetes Logs Metadata and Filtering, please reach out to ibraraslam@microsoft.com or fill out this survey!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).
Coming soon: 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!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!Observability at scale – Azure Monitor Metrics Data Plane API
Azure offers customers the opportunity to scale infrastructure catering to their extensive workload requirements. However, effectively monitoring large deployments across various tenants and subscriptions has posed a challenge. To empower customers with seamless querying capabilities at scale, Microsoft Azure Monitor has introduced the Azure Metrics Data Plane API. This API became generally available to all Azure customers in January 2024. To simplify the setup of observability using this newly released API, the Microsoft Cloud for ISVs & AI engineering team has developed an open-source observability solution.
