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.Generally Available - Azure Monitor Private Link Scope (AMPLS) Scale Limits Increased by 10x!
Introduction We are excited to announce the General Availability (GA) of Azure Monitor Private Link Scope (AMPLS) scale limit increase, delivering 10x scalability improvements compared to previous limits. This enhancement empowers customers to securely connect more Azure Monitor resources via Private Link, ensuring network isolation, compliance, and Zero Trust alignment for large-scale environments. What is Azure Monitor Private Link Scope (AMPLS)? Azure Monitor Private Link Scope (AMPLS) is a feature that allows you to securely connect Azure Monitor resources to your virtual network using private endpoints. This ensures that your monitoring data is accessed only through authorized private networks, preventing data exfiltration and keeping all traffic inside the Azure backbone network. AMPLS – Scale Limits Increased by 10x in Public Cloud & Sovereign Cloud (Fairfax/Mooncake) - Regions In a groundbreaking development, we are excited to share that the scale limits for Azure Monitor Private Link Scope (AMPLS) have been significantly increased by tenfold (10x) in Public & Sovereign Cloud regions as part of the General Availability! This substantial enhancement empowers our customers to manage their resources more efficiently and securely with private links using AMPLS, ensuring that workload logs are routed via the Microsoft backbone network. What’s New? 10x Scale Increase Connect up to 3,000 Log Analytics workspaces per AMPLS (previously 300) Connect up to 10,000 Application Insights components per AMPLS (previously 1,000) 20x Resource Connectivity Each Azure Monitor resource can now connect to 100 AMPLS resources (previously 5) Enhanced UX/UI Redesigned AMPLS interface supports loading 13,000+ resources with pagination for smooth navigation Private Endpoint Support Each AMPLS object can connect to 10 private endpoints, ensuring secure telemetry flows Why It Matters Top Azure Strategic 500 customers, including major Telecom service providers and Banking & Financial Services organizations, have noted that previous AMPLS limits did not adequately support their increasing requirements. The demand for private links has grown 3–5 times over existing capacity, affecting both network isolation and integration of essential workloads. This General Availability release resolves these issues, providing centralized monitoring at scale while maintaining robust security and performance. Customer Stories Our solution now enables customers to scale their Azure Monitor resources significantly, ensuring seamless network configurations and enhanced performance. Customer B - Case Study: Leading Banking & Financial Services Customer Challenge: The Banking Customer faced complexity in delivering personalized insights due to intricate workflows and content systems. They needed a solution that could scale securely while maintaining compliance and performance for business-critical applications. Solution: The Banking Customer has implemented Microsoft Private Links Services (AMPLS) to enhance the security and performance of financial models for smart finance assistants, leading to greater efficiency and improved client engagement. To ensure secure telemetry flow and compliance, the banking customer implemented Azure Monitor with Private Link Scope (AMPLS) and leveraged the AMPLS Scale Limit Increase feature. Business Impact: Strengthened security posture aligned with Zero Trust principles Improved operational efficiency for monitoring and reporting Delivered a future-ready architecture that scales with evolving compliance and performance demands Customer B - Case Study: Leading Telecom Service Provider - Scaling Secure Monitoring with AMPLS Architecture: A Leading Telecom Service Provider employs a highly micro-segmented design where each DevOps team operates in its own workspace to maximize security and isolation. Challenge: While this design strengthens security, it introduces complexity for large-scale monitoring and reporting due to physical and logical limitations on Azure Monitor Private Link Scope (AMPLS). Previous scale limits made it difficult to centralize telemetry without compromising isolation. Solution: The AMPLS Scale Limit Increase feature enabled the Telecom Service Provider to expand Azure Monitor resources significantly. Monitoring traffic now routes through Microsoft’s backbone network, reducing data exfiltration risks and supporting Zero Trust principles. Impact & Benefits Scalability: Supports up to 3,000 Log Analytics workspaces and 10,000 Application Insights components per AMPLS (10× increase). Efficiency: Each Azure Monitor resource can now connect to 100 AMPLS resources (20× increase). Security: Private connectivity via Microsoft backbone mitigates data exfiltration risks. Operational Excellence: Simplifies configuration for 13K+ Azure Monitor resources, reducing overhead for DevOps teams. Customer Benefits & Results Our solution significantly enhances customers’ ability to manage Azure Monitor resources securely and at scale using Azure Monitor Private Link Scope (AMPLS). Key Benefits Massive Scale Increase 3,000 Log Analytics workspaces (previously 300) 10,000 Application Insights components (previously 1,000) Each AMPLS object can now connect to: Azure Monitor resources can now connect with up to 100 AMPLS resources (20× increase). Broader Resource Support Data Collection Endpoints (DCE) Log Analytics Workspaces (LA WS) Application Insights components (AI) Supported resource types include: Improved UX/UI Redesigned AMPLS interface supports loading 13,000+ Azure Monitor resources with pagination for smooth navigation. Private Endpoint Connectivity Each AMPLS object can connect to 10 private endpoints, ensuring secure telemetry flows. Resources: Explore the new capabilities of Azure Monitor Private Link Scope (AMPLS) and see how it can transform your network isolation and resource management. Visit our Azure Monitor Private Link Scope (AMPLS) documentation page for more details and start leveraging these enhancements today! For detailed information on configuring Azure Monitor private link scope and azure monitor resources, please refer to the following link: Use Azure Private Link to connect networks to Azure Monitor - Azure Monitor | Microsoft Learn Design your Azure Private Link setup - Azure Monitor | Microsoft Learn Configure your private link - Azure Monitor | Microsoft LearnAnnouncing 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.
Troubleshoot with OTLP signals in Azure Monitor (Limited Public Preview)
As organizations increasingly rely on distributed cloud-native applications, the need for comprehensive standards-based observability has never been greater. OpenTelemetry (OTel) has emerged as the industry standard for collecting and transmitting telemetry data, enabling unified monitoring across diverse platforms and services. Microsoft is among the top contributors to OpenTelemetry. Azure Monitor is expanding its support for the OTel standard with this preview, empowering developers and operations teams to seamlessly capture, analyze, and act on critical signals from their applications and infrastructure. With this limited preview (sign-up here), regardless of where your applications are running, you can channel the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) logs, metrics and traces to Azure Monitor directly. On Azure compute platforms, we have simpler collection orchestration that also unifies application and infrastructure telemetry collection with the Azure Monitor collection offerings for VM/VMSS or AKS. On Azure VMs/VMSS (or any Azure Arc supported compute), you can use the Azure Monitor Agent (AMA) that you are already using to collect infrastructure logs. On AKS, the Azure Monitor add-ons that orchestrate Container Insights and managed Prometheus, will also auto configure the collection of OTLP signals from your applications (or auto-instrument with Azure Monitor OTel Distro for supported languages). On these platforms or anywhere else, you can choose to use OpenTelemetry Collector, and channel the OTLP signals from your OTel SDK instrumented application directly to Azure Monitor cloud ingestion endpoints. OTLP metrics will be stored in Azure Monitor Workspace, a Prometheus metrics store. Logs and traces will be stored in Azure Monitor Log Analytics Workspace in an OTel semantic conventions-based schema. Application Insights experiences will light up, enabling all distributed tracing and troubleshooting experiences powered by Azure Monitor, as well as out of the box Dashboards with Grafana from the community. With this preview, we are also extending the support for auto-instrumentation of applications on AKS to .NET and Python applications and introducing OTLP metrics collection from all auto-instrumented applications (Java/Node/.NET/Python). Sign-up for the preview here: https://aka.ms/azuremonitorotelpreview.
Introducing Monitoring Coverage: Assess and Improve Your Monitoring Posture at Scale
As organizations grow their Azure footprint, ensuring consistent monitoring coverage across resources becomes increasingly important. The new Monitoring Coverage (preview) feature in Azure Monitor provides a single, centralized experience to assess, configure at-scale, and enhance monitoring across your environment with ease. A unified view of your monitoring health Monitoring Coverage consolidates insights from Azure Advisor to highlight where monitoring can be improved. You can see which Azure resources already have basic out-of-box telemetry enabled and which could benefit from additional recommended settings, helping you close gaps in your observability strategy at scale. Key capabilities Comprehensive visibility: Get an overview of monitoring coverage across common Azure resource types. Actionable recommendations: Identify and apply Azure Advisor recommendations at-scale to strengthen your monitoring posture. Centralized configuration: Enable recommended monitoring settings for multiple resources from a single pane of glass. Detailed resource insights: Explore individual resource details to review active monitoring configurations and applicable recommendations. How to access In the Azure portal, open Azure Monitor. Under the Settings section of the left navigation, select Monitoring Coverage (preview). You can scope the view using standard Azure filters; Subscriptions, Resource groups, Tags, Locations, and Resource types, allowing you to focus on the resources you manage. Supported resource types During preview, Monitoring Coverage supports Virtual Machines (VMs) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters. Support for additional Azure services will roll out in future updates. Overview tab The Overview tab provides a snapshot of your overall monitoring landscape, showing which resources have: Basic monitoring: Default metrics and logs enabled upon creation. Enhanced monitoring: Microsoft-recommended configurations for deeper insights and improved observability. This view makes it easy to identify coverage gaps and take quick action to enable enhanced monitoring, which may incur additional cost depending on your configuration. Streamlined enablement experience When you choose to enable monitoring: The Enablement screen lists all resources included in the operation. You can deselect specific resources if needed. Selecting View details and configure allows customization by resource type—for example, selecting a Log Analytics workspace. The Review and Enable tab summarizes all changes before application. Once enabled, data typically begins flowing to the designated workspace within 30–60 minutes. During this preview, you can enable monitoring for up to 100 resources at a time, and an existing Log Analytics workspace or Azure Monitor Workspace is required. Monitoring Details page For a deeper look, the Monitoring Details page lets you: View resources as a list or group them by recommendation. Filter using standard Azure filters. See the Monitoring coverage column summarizing enabled recommendations and data collection rules. Enable individual monitoring settings directly from this view when managing resources one at a time. Share your feedback We’re actively evolving Monitoring Coverage based on user input. To share your feedback or suggest new capabilities, use the Feedback link at the top of the page in the Azure portal. Your insights will help shape the future of Azure Monitor. Try Monitoring Coverage (preview) today in the Azure portal to assess your observability coverage and take the next step toward proactive, consistent monitoring across your Azure environment.
Comprehensive VM Monitoring with OpenTelemetry performance counters
Monitoring virtual machines often requires multiple tools and manual investigation. You may see high CPU or memory usage, but identifying the process responsible usually means signing in to the VM and running diagnostic commands. Azure Monitor already provides Guest OS performance monitoring through Log Analytics‑based metrics, trusted for its flexibility, deep integration, and advanced analytics, including custom performance counters, extended retention, and powerful KQL queries. Many customers use LA‑based metrics to correlate performance with other log data sources and build rich operational insights. Today, we’re excited to introduce a new preview capability: OpenTelemetry (OTel) Guest OS metrics for VMs and Arc servers, with metric data stored in the metrics-optimized Azure Monitor Workspace (AMW). OTel provides a standards‑based pipeline with a unified schema, richer system and process counters, and streamlined integration with open‑source and cloud‑native observability tooling. It’s designed for simpler onboarding, cost‑efficient metric storage, and more granular visibility into what’s happening inside the VM. What are OpenTelemetry Guest OS metrics OTel Guest OS metrics are system and process‑level performance counters collected from inside a VM. This includes CPU, memory, disk I/O, network, and per‑process details such as CPU percent, memory percent, uptime, and thread count. This level of visibility helps you diagnose issues without signing into the VM. Why They Matter Azure Monitor continues to support Guest OS metrics through Log Analytics, and you now have the option to use OTel‑based Guest OS metrics. OTel offers richer insights, faster query performance, and lower cost, and is a good fit when you want a modern, standards‑based pipeline with deeper system visibility. Key Benefits Benefit Description Unified data model Consistent metric names and schema across Windows and Linux for easier, reusable queries and dashboards Richer, simplified counters More system and process metrics (e.g., per‑process CPU, memory, disk I/O) and consolidation of legacy counters into clearer OTel metrics. Easy onboarding Collect OTel metrics with minimal setup. Flexible visualization Use the Azure portal, Metrics Explorer, or Azure Monitor Dashboards with Grafana. Cost‑efficient performance Store metrics in Azure Monitor Workspace instead of Log Analytics ingestion for lower cost and faster queries. When to use LA‑based metrics (GA) vs OTel‑based metrics (Preview) LA-based metrics (GA) OTel-based metrics (Preview) Custom performance counters or extended retention Advanced KQL analytics and log‑metric correlation A mature, fully supported pipeline for operational analytics A standards‑based, unified schema across platforms Easier onboarding and broader system/process coverage Cost‑efficient metric storage with improved query performance We recommend evaluating your requirements to determine which approach best fits your needs. LA-based metrics remain the foundation for customers who need advanced analytics and correlation, while OTel-based metrics open new possibilities for modern VM observability. Onboarding VMs to OpenTelemetry performance counters Onboarding your virtual machines and Arc servers to OpenTelemetry-based counters is now both cost-efficient and easier than ever. With the new onboarding experience, you can enable guest-level metrics using a lightweight, standards-based OTel pipeline with no complex setup required. These system-level counters are available at no additional cost and provide deep visibility into CPU, memory, disk, network, and process activity from inside the VM. Azure Monitor automatically configures your Data Collection Rules (DCRs) to route these OpenTelemetry counters through the Monitor pipeline, ensuring you get full monitoring coverage with minimal configuration. Additionally, you can also onboard your VMs at scale using the new Monitoring Coverage experience or Essential Machine Management (EMM). For teams managing large fleets of virtual machines, these capabilities turn onboarding into a one-click operation, eliminating the need to repeat manual steps for each machine. This is especially valuable in enterprises or environments with dynamic VM creation, where maintaining consistent visibility across every machine is critical for performance, compliance, and troubleshooting. After onboarding at scale, you can further customize your monitoring. By editing the Data Collection Rule (DCR) created during onboarding, you can collect additional metrics and logs, then automatically apply those updates across all VMs associated with that DCR. This allows you to extend monitoring coverage beyond the default counters and adapt to your observability as your environment evolves. New Capabilities Powered by OpenTelemetry New VM monitoring experience powered by OpenTelemetry (preview) We're excited to announce the public preview of the enhanced monitoring experience for Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) and Arc servers. This redesign brings comprehensive monitoring capabilities in a single, streamlined view, helping you more efficiently observe, diagnose, and optimize your virtual machines. The new experience offers two levels of insight within one unified interface: Basic view (Host OS based): Available for all Azure VMs with no configuration required. This view surfaces key host level metrics including CPU, disk, and network performance for quick health checks. Detailed view (Guest OS based): Requires a simple onboarding step and is available at no additional cost. Azure Monitor already provides a GA detailed view powered by Log Analytics based Guest OS metrics, and this remains fully supported. This preview option is powered by OTel Guest OS metrics to provide expanded metric coverage and the new, streamlined monitoring experience introduced above Detailed view (Guest OS based with OTel) and enhanced monitoring experience for VMs You can access the new experience directly in the Azure portal under Virtual Machine → Monitoring → Insights. Building Custom Dashboards with Azure Monitor Dashboards in Grafana Azure Monitor Dashboards with Grafana lets you build custom visualizations on top of OTel Guest OS metrics. In addition to the out-of-the-box VM monitoring experience, you can create tailored dashboards to analyze the specific system or process-level signals that matter most to your workloads. For example, you can build a dashboard that breaks down CPU, memory, disk, and network usage at the process level. This helps you quickly identify unusual behavior or resource hotspots without signing in to the VM. Learn more. Query-based metric alerts (preview) Azure Monitor now supports PromQL-based metric alerts for OTel metrics stored in Azure Monitor Workspace, enabling flexible and powerful query-driven alerting. For example, you can configure an alert to notify you when a specific process shows unusual CPU usage, allowing you to detect issues earlier and take action before they impact users. PromQL based metric alert that triggers when the backupdatawarehouse.exe process exceeds 80% memory usage Get Started Explore the new OpenTelemetry-powered experiences today: Get started with VM Monitoring (Preview) Use Azure Monitor Dashboards with Grafana Query Based Metric Alerts Overview (Preview) We are also starting a limited public preview of application monitoring with OpenTelemetry signal collection from Azure VMs, VMSS and Arc Server. Learn more. Together, these previews mark a major step toward a unified and open monitoring platform designed to make observability simpler, faster, and aligned with open standards across every layer of your environment.Announcing resource-scope query for Azure Monitor Workspaces
We’re excited to announce the public preview of resource-scope query for Azure Monitor Workspaces (AMWs)—a major step forward in simplifying observability, improving access control, and aligning with Azure-native experiences. This new capability builds on the successful implementation of resource-scope query in Log Analytics Workspaces (LAWs), which transformed how users access logs by aligning them with Azure resource scopes. We’re now bringing the same power and flexibility to metrics in AMWs. What is resource-scope query? Resource-scope query has been a frequently requested capability that allows users to query metrics scoped to a specific resource, resource group, or subscription—rather than needing to know which AMW the metrics are stored in. This means: Simpler querying: users can scope to the context of one or more resources directly, without knowledge of where metrics are stored. Granular Azure RBAC control: if the AMW is configured in resource-centric access mode, user permissions are checked against the resources they are querying for, rather than access to the workspace itself - just like how LAW works today. This supports security best practices for least privileged access requirements. Why use resource-centric query? Traditional AMW querying required users to: Know the exact AMW storing their metrics. Have access to the AMW. Navigate away from the resource context to query metrics. This created friction for DevOps teams and on-call engineers who do not necessarily know which AMW to query when responding to an alert. With resource-centric querying: Users can query metrics directly from the resource’s Metrics blade. Least privilege access is respected—users only need access to the resource(s) they are querying about. Central teams can maintain control of AMWs while empowering app teams to self-monitor. How does it work? All metrics ingested via Azure Monitor Agent are automatically stamped with dimensions like Microsoft.resourceid, Microsoft.subscriptionid, and Microsoft.resourcegroupname to enable this experience. The addition of these dimensions does not have any cost implications to end users. Resource-centric queries use a new endpoint: https://query.<region>.prometheus.monitor.azure.com We will re-route queries as needed from any region, but we recommend choosing the one nearest to your AMWs for the best performance. Users can query via: Azure Portal PromQL Editor Grafana dashboards (with data source configuration) Query-based metric alerts Azure Monitor solutions like Container Insights and App Insights (when using OTel metrics with AMW as data source) Prometheus HTTP APIs When querying programmatically, users pass an HTTP header: x-ms-azure-scoping: <ARM Resource ID> Scoping supports a single: Individual resource Resource group Subscription At this time, scoping is only support at a single-resource level, but comma-separated multi-resource scoping will be added by the end of 2025. Who Can Benefit? Application Teams: Query metrics for their own resources without needing AMW access. Central Monitoring Teams: Maintain control of AMWs while enabling secure, scoped access for app teams. DevOps Engineers: Respond to alerts and troubleshoot specific resources without needing to locate the AMW(s) storing the metrics they need. Grafana Users: Configure dashboards scoped to subscriptions or resource groups with dynamic variables without needing to identify the AMW(s) storing their metrics. When Is This Available? Microsoft. dimension stamping* is already complete and ongoing for all AMWs. Public Preview of the resource-centric query endpoint begins October 10th, 2025. Starting on that date, all newly created AMWs will default to resource-context access mode. What is the AMW “access control mode”? The access control mode is a setting on each workspace that defines how permissions are determined for the workspace. Require workspace permissions. This control mode does NOT allow granular resource-level Azure RBAC. To access the workspace, the user must be granted permissions to the workspace. When a user scopes their query to a workspace, workspace permissions apply. When a user scopes their query to a resource, both workspace permissions AND resource permissions are verified. This setting is the default for all workspaces created before October 2025. Use resource or workspace permissions. This control mode allows granular Azure RBAC. Users can be granted access to only data associated with resources they can view by assigning Azure read permission. When a user scopes their query to a workspace, workspace permissions apply. When a user scopes their query to a resource, only resource permissions are verified, and workspace permissions are ignored. This setting is the default for all workspaces created after October 2025. Read about how to change the control mode for your workspaces here. Final Thoughts Resource-centric query brings AMWs in line with Azure-native experiences, enabling secure, scalable, and intuitive observability. Whether you’re managing thousands of VMs, deploying AKS clusters, or building custom apps with OpenTelemetry, this feature empowers you to monitor in the context of your workloads or resources rather than needing to first query the AMW(s) and then filter down on what you’re looking for. To get started, simply navigate to your resource’s Metrics blade after October 10 th , 2025 or configure your Grafana data source to use the new query endpoint.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.What’s new in Observability at Build 2025
At Build 2025, we are excited to announce new features in Azure Monitor designed to enhance observability for developers and SREs, making it easier for you to streamline troubleshooting, improve monitoring efficiency, and gain deeper insights into application performance. With our new AI-powered tools, customizable alerts, and advanced visualization capabilities, we’re empowering developers to deliver high-quality, resilient applications with greater operational efficiency. AI-Powered Troubleshooting Capabilities We are excited to disclose two new AI-powered features, as well as share an update to a GA feature, which enhance troubleshooting and monitoring: AI-powered investigations (Public Preview): Identifies possible explanations for service degradations via automated analyses, consolidating all observability-related data for faster problem mitigation. Attend our live demo at Build and learn more here. Health models (Public Preview – coming in June 2025): Significantly improves the efficiency of detecting business-impacting issues in workloads, empowering organizations to deliver applications with operational efficiency and resilience through a full-stack view of workload health. Attend our live demo at Build to get a preview of the experience and learn more here. AI-powered Application Insights Code Optimizations (GA): Provides code-level suggestions for running .NET apps on Azure. Now, it’s easier to get code-level suggestions with GitHub Copilot coding agent (preview) and GitHub Copilot for Azure in VS Code. Learn more here. Enhanced AI and agent observability Azure Monitor and Azure AI Foundry now jointly offer real-time monitoring and continuous evaluation of AI apps and agentic systems in production. These capabilities are deeply integrated with the Foundry Observability experience and allow you to track key metrics such as performance, quality, safety, and resource usage. Features include: Unified observability dashboard for generative AI apps and agents (Public Preview): Provides full-stack visibility of AI apps and infrastructure with AI app metrics surfaced in both Azure Monitor and Foundry Observability. Alerts: Data is published to Azure Monitor Application Insights, allowing users to set alerts and analyze them for troubleshooting. Debug with tracing capabilities: Enables detailed root-cause analysis of issues like groundedness regressions. Learn more in our breakout session at Build! Improved Visualization We have expanded our visualization capabilities, particularly for Kubernetes services: Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana (Public Preview): Create and edit Grafana dashboards directly in the Azure Portal with no additional cost. This includes dashboards for Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) and other Azure resources. Learn more. Managed Prometheus Visualizations: Supports managed Prometheus visualizations for both AKS clusters (GA) and Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters (Public Preview), offering a more cost-efficient and performant solution. Learn more. Customized and Simplified Monitoring Through enhancements to alert customization, we’re making it easier for you to get started with monitoring: Prometheus community recommended alerts: Offers one-click enablement of Prometheus recommended alerts for AKS clusters (GA) and Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters (Public Preview), providing comprehensive alerting coverage across cluster, node, and pod levels. Simple log alerts (Public Preview): Designed to provide a simplified and more intuitive experience for monitoring and alerting, Simple log alerts evaluate each row individually, providing faster alerting compared to traditional log alerts. Simple log alerts support multiple log tiers, including Analytics and Basic Logs, which previously did not have any alerting solution. Learn more. Customizable email subjects for log search alerts (Public Preview): Allows customers to personalize the subject lines of alert emails including dynamic values, making it easier to quickly identify and respond to alerts. Send a custom event from the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro (GA): Offers developers a way to track user or system actions that matter the most to their business objectives, now available in the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro. Learn more. Application Insights auto-instrumentation for Java and Node Microservices on AKS (Public Preview): Easily monitor your Java and Node deployments without changing your code by leveraging auto-instrumentation that is integrated into the AKS cluster. These capabilities will help you easily assess the performance of your application and identify the cause of incidents efficiently. Learn more. Enhancements for Large Enterprises and Government Entities Azure Monitor Logs is introducing several new features aimed at supporting highly sensitive and high-volume logs, empowering large enterprises and government entities. With better data control and access, developers at these organizations can work better with IT Professionals to improve the reliability of their applications. Workspace replication (GA): Enhances resilience to regional incidents by enabling cross-regional workspace replication. Logs are ingested in both regions, ensuring continued observability through dashboards, alerts, and advanced solutions like Microsoft Sentinel. Granular RBAC (Public Preview): Supports granular role-based access control (RBAC) using Azure Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC). This allows organizations to have row-level control on which data is visible to specific users. Data deletion capability (GA): Allows customers to quickly mark unwanted log entries, such as sensitive or corrupt data, as deleted without physically removing them from storage. It’s useful for unplanned deletions using filters to target specific records, ensuring data integrity for analysis. Process more log records in the Azure Portal (GA): Supports up to 100,000 records per query in the Azure Portal, enabling deeper investigations and broader data analysis directly within the portal without need for additional tools. We’re proud to further Azure Monitor's commitment to providing comprehensive and efficient observability solutions for developers, SREs, and IT Professionals alike. For more information, chat with Observability experts through the following sessions at Build 2025: BRK168: AI and Agent Observability with Azure AI Foundry and Azure Monitor BRK188: Power your AI Apps Across Cloud and Edge with Azure Arc DEM547: Enable application monitoring and troubleshooting faster with Azure Monitor DEM537: Mastering Azure Monitor: Essential Tips in 15 Minutes Expo Hall (Meet the Experts): Azure Arc and Azure Monitor boothAzure Monitor Application Insights Auto-Instrumentation for Java and Node Microservices on AKS
Key Takeaways (TLDR) Monitor Java and Node applications with zero code changes Fast onboarding: just 2 steps Supports distributed tracing, logs, and metrics Correlates application-level telemetry in Application Insights with infrastructure-level telemetry in Container Insights Available today in public preview Introduction Monitoring your applications is now easier than ever with the public preview release of Auto-Instrumentation for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). You can now easily monitor your Java and Node deployments without changing your code by leveraging auto-instrumentation that is integrated into the AKS cluster. This feature is ideal for developers or operators who are... Looking to add monitoring in the easiest way possible, without modifying code and avoiding ongoing SDK update maintenance. Starting out on their monitoring journey and looking to benefit from carefully chosen default configurations with the ability to tweak them over time. Working with someone else’s code and looking to instrument at scale. Or considering monitoring for the first time at the time of deployment. Before the introduction of this feature, users needed to manually instrument code, install language-specific SDKs, and manage updates on their own—a process that involved significant effort and numerous opportunities for errors. Now, all you need to do is follow a simple two-step process to instrument your applications and automatically send correlated OpenTelemetry-based application-level logs, metrics, and distributed tracing to your Application Insights resource. With AKS Auto-Instrumentation, you will be able to assess the performance of your application and identify the cause of any incidents more efficiently using the robust application performance monitoring capabilities of Azure Monitor Application Insights. This streamlined approach not only saves time but also ensures that your monitoring setup is both reliable and scalable. Feature Enablement and Onboarding To onboard to this feature, you will need to follow a two-step process: Prepare your cluster by installing the application monitoring webhook. Choose between namespace-wide onboarding or per-deployment onboarding by creating K8’s custom resources. Namespace-wide onboarding is the easiest method. It allows you to instrument all Java or Node deployments in your namespace and direct telemetry to a single Application Insights resource. Per-deployment onboarding allows more control by targeting specific deployments and directing telemetry to different Application Insights resources. Once the custom resource is created, you will need to deploy or redeploy your application, and telemetry will start flowing to Application Insights. For step-by-step instructions and to learn more about onboarding visit our official documentation on MS Learn. The Application Insights experience Once telemetry begins flowing, you can take advantage of Application Insights features such as Application Map, Failures/Performance Views, Availability, and more to help you efficiently diagnose and troubleshoot application issues. Let’s look at an example: I have an auto-instrumented distributed application running in the demoapp namespace of my AKS cluster. It consists of: One Java microservice Two Node.js microservices MongoDB and Redis as its data layer Scenario: End users have been complaining about some latency in the application. As the DRI, I can start my troubleshooting journey by going to the Application Map to get a topological view of my distributed application. I open Application Map and notice MicroserviceA has a red border - 50% of calls are erroring. The Container Insights card shows healthy pods - no failed pods or high CPU/memory usage. I can eliminate infrastructure issues as the cause of the slowness. In the Performance card, I spot that the rescuepet operation has an average duration of 10 seconds. That's pretty long. I drill in to get a distributed trace of the operation and find the root cause: an OutOfMemoryError. In this scenario, the issue has been identified as an out-of-memory error at the application layer. However, when the root cause is not in the code but in the infrastructure I get a full set of resource properties with every distributed trace so I can easily identify the infra resources running each span of my trace. I can click the investigate pods button to transition to Azure Monitor Container Insights and investigate my pods further. This correlation between application-level and infrastructure-level telemetry makes it much easier to determine whether the issue is caused by the application or the infrastructure. Pricing There is no additional cost to use AKS auto-instrumentation to send data to Azure Monitor. You will be only charged as per the current pricing. What’s Next Language Support This integration supports Java and Node workloads by leveraging the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry distro. We have distros for .NET and Python as well and we are working to integrate these distros into this solution. At that point, this integration will support .NET, Python, Java and Node.js. For customers that want to instrument workloads in other languages such as Go, Ruby, PHP, etc. we plan to leverage open-source instrumentations available in the Open Telemetry community. In this scenario, customers will instrument their code using open source OpenTelemetry instrumentations, and we will provide mechanisms that will make it easy to channel the telemetry to Application Insights. Application Insights will expose an endpoint that accepts OpenTelemetry Language Protocol (OTLP) signals and configure the instrumented workload to channel the telemetry to this endpoint. Operating Systems and K8’s Controllers Right now, you can only instrument kubernetes deployments running on Linux node pools, but we plan to expand support to introduce support for Linux ARM64 node pools as well as support for StatefulSet, Job, Cronjob, and Replicaset controller types. Portal Experiences We are also working on Azure portal experiences to make onboarding easier. When our portal experiences for onboarding are released, users will be able to install the Application Insights extension for AKS using the portal and use a portal user interface to instrument their workloads instead of having to create custom resources. Beyond onboarding, we are working to build Application Insights consumption experiences within the AKS namespace and workloads blade. You will be able to see application-level telemetry right there in the AKS portal without having to navigate away from your cluster to Application Insights. FAQs: What are the advantages of AKS Auto-Instrumentation? No code changes required No access to source code required No configuration changes required Eliminates instrumentation maintenance What languages are supported by AKS Auto-Instrumentation? Currently, AKS Auto-Instrumentation supports Java and Node.js applications. Python and .NET support is coming soon. Moreover, we will be adding support for all OTel supported languages like Go soon via native OTLP ingestion. Does AKS Auto-Instrumentation support custom metrics? For Node.js applications, custom metrics require manual instrumentation with the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro. Java applications allow custom metrics with auto-instrumentation. Click here for more FAQs. This article was co-authored by Rishab Jolly and Abinet Abate
