Microsoft recently introduced Azure Managed Grafana in preview, including new Grafana integrations with Azure Monitor. With Azure Managed Grafana, customers can now view their Azure monitoring data in Grafana dashboards and have new out-of-the-box Azure Monitor dashboards.
Grafana is a popular open-source analytics visualization tool that allows users to bring together logs, traces, metrics, and other disparate data from across an organization, regardless of where it is stored. Azure Managed Grafana is built on top of Grafana as a fully-managed Azure service operated and supported by Microsoft, allowing customers to view their Azure monitoring data more efficiently in Grafana dashboards.
According to the Microsoft documentation, the current preview provides the following integrations with Grafana:
- Built-in support for Azure Monitor and Azure Data Explorer makes it easy for users to connect to any resource in their subscription and view all resulting telemetry in a familiar Grafana dashboard
- User authentication and access control using Azure Active Directory identities enable central management of Grafana instances
- Direct import of existing charts from Azure portal through one-click "pin to" operations
Customers can get started with Azure Managed Grafana through the Azure Portal by creating a so-called Managed Grafana workspace specifying subscription, name, location, and roles. Next, once the workspace is available, they can start interacting with the Grafana application to configure data sources and create dashboards, reporting, and alerts.
Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/managed-grafana/quickstart-managed-grafana-portal
Azure Managed Grafana resulted from the partnership last year with Grafana Labs. The partnership's goal was to develop a Microsoft Azure managed service that lets customers run Grafana natively within the Azure cloud platform. And now, with the preview of Azure Managed Grafana, Microsoft follows up on its competitor in the public cloud space, AWS, who released Amazon Managed Grafana into general availability last year.
Amanda Silver, CVP of the product developer division at Microsoft, tweeted:
In partnership with Grafana Labs, you can now improve the observability of your apps with Azure Managed Grafana.
In addition, Arti Gulwadi, senior product marketing manager at Microsoft, stated in an Azure announcement blog post on Azure Managed Grafana:
With Azure Managed Grafana, the Grafana dashboards our customers are familiar with are now integrated seamlessly with the services and security of Azure.
More details on Azure Managed Grafana are available on the documentation landing page, and the pricing is based on the number of active users and, for certain tiers, the hosting infrastructure costs. The details of the pricing can be found on the pricing page.
