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.Accelerate your observability journey with Azure Monitor pipeline (preview)
In the ever-evolving landscape of digital infrastructure, transparency in resource and application performance is imperative. Success hinges on visibility, and that’s true whether you’re operating on Azure, on-premise, or at the edge. As organizations scale their infrastructures and applications, the volume of observability data naturally increases. This surge can complicate the management of networking, data storage and ingestion, often forcing a trade-off between cost management and observability. The complexity doesn’t end there. The very tools designed to ingest, process, and route this data can be both costly and complex, adding layers of operational challenges. Moreover, edge infrastructure is deployed near IoT devices for optimal data processing, high availability, and reduced latency. This adds its own set of challenges when it comes to collecting telemetry from such constrained environments. Recognizing these challenges, our team has been focused on providing a robust, highly scalable, and secure data ingestion solution through Azure Monitor. We are thrilled to announce the preview of the Azure Monitor pipeline at edge. What is Azure Monitor pipeline? Azure Monitor pipeline, similar to ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process, enhances traditional data collection methods. It streamlines data collection from various sources through a unified ingestion pipeline and utilizes a standardized configuration approach that is more efficient and scalable. This is particularly beneficial for cloud-based monitoring in Azure. We are now extending our Azure Monitor pipeline capabilities from the cloud to the edge, enabling high-scale data ingestion with centralized configuration management. What is Azure Monitor pipeline at edge? Azure Monitor pipeline at edge is a powerful solution designed to facilitate high-scale data ingestion and routing from edge environments to Azure Monitor for observability. It leverages the robust capabilities of the vendor-agnostic tool - OpenTelemetry Collector, which is used by enterprises worldwide to manage high volumes of telemetry each month. With the Azure Monitor pipeline at edge, organizations can tap into the same highly scalable platform with a standardized configuration and reliability. Whether dealing with petabytes of data or seeking consistent observability experience across Azure, edge, and multi-cloud, this solution empowers organizations to reliably collect telemetry and drive operational excellence. The Azure Monitor pipeline at edge is equipped with out-of-the-box capabilities to receive telemetry from a diverse range of resources and route it to Azure Monitor. Here are some key features: High scale data ingestion: Customers have various devices and resources at edge, emitting high volume of data. With Azure Monitor pipeline at edge, you can seamlessly scale to support ingestion of high volume of data in the cloud. Azure Monitor pipeline can be deployed on your on-premises Kubernetes cluster as an Arc Kubernetes cluster extension. This allows it to adapt to your data scaling needs by running multiple replica sets and provides you with full control to define workflows and route high-volume data to Azure Monitor. Observing resources in isolated environments: In the manufacturing sector, resources are often located in isolated network zones without direct cloud connectivity, posing challenges for telemetry collection. With the Azure Monitor pipeline at edge, combined with Azure IoT Layered Network Management, you can facilitate a connection between Azure and Kubernetes clusters in isolated networks, deploy the Azure Monitor pipeline at edge, collect data from resources in segmented networks, and route it to Azure Monitor for comprehensive observability. Reliable data ingestion and prevent data loss: Edge environments frequently encounter intermittent connectivity, leading to potential data loss and disrupting data continuity. The Azure Monitor pipeline at edge allows you to cache logs during periods of intermittent connectivity. When connectivity is re-established, your data is synchronized with Azure Monitor, preventing data loss. Getting started It’s super easy to get started! You need to deploy the Azure Monitor pipeline on a single Arc-enabled Kubernetes cluster in your environment. Once that is done, you can configure your resources to emit the telemetry to Azure Monitor pipeline at edge and ingest into Azure Monitor for observability. Once you Arc-enable your on-prem Kubernetes cluster and the prerequisites are met, go the Extension section, select Azure Monitor pipeline extension (preview) and create the instance. Alternatively, from the search bar in the Azure portal, select Azure Monitor pipeline and then click Create. Enter the information related to the pipeline instance. The Dataflow tab allows you to create and edit dataflows for the pipeline instance. Configure your resources to emit the telemetry to the Azure Monitor pipeline. Learn more in our documentation. Pricing There is no additional cost to use Azure Monitor pipeline to send data to Azure Monitor. You will be only charged for data ingestion as per the current pricing. FAQ What telemetry can be collected using Azure Monitor pipeline? Currently, in public preview, you can collect syslogs and OTLP logs using Azure Monitor pipeline at edge. We will keep expanding the data collection capabilities based on your feedback and requirements. How can I perform transformations on the telemetry that is collected? You can certainly transform your telemetry! Since this is an extension of Azure Monitor pipeline, you can perform the data collection transformations in the Azure Monitor pipeline at cloud. Is this another agent for data collection? Azure Monitor pipeline at edge is engineered to function in environments where installing agents on resources is not feasible, whether due to technical limitations or warranty concerns. It enables you to get the telemetry from these resources and acts as a central forwarding component to ingest high volume data. I have 100 Linux servers in my on-prem environment. Do I need to deploy Azure Monitor pipeline at edge on all of them? You need to deploy the Azure Monitor pipeline at edge on a single Arc-enabled Kubernetes cluster and configure it to ingest data into Azure Monitor. Once that is completed, you can configure your Linux servers to emit telemetry to the Azure Monitor pipeline at edge instance.
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.
