Visualize with Grafana

This article explains how to use Grafana with Azure Monitor. It covers free Azure dashboards for integrated data and Managed Grafana for advanced features.

Dashboards with Grafana

Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana enable you to use Grafana's query, transformation, and visualization capability on:

• Azure Monitor
  • Metrics
  • Logs
  • Traces
• Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus
• Azure Resource Graph

You can:

• Create and edit dashboards directly in the Azure portal for free and without administrative overhead.
• Import dashboards from thousands of publicly available Grafana community dashboards.
• Apply a wide range of Grafana visualizations and client-side transformations to Azure monitoring data.
• Manage Grafana dashboards as native Azure resources, including using Azure RBAC and automation via ARM template and Bicep templates.

You can access Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana through the Azure portal from Azure Monitor or Azure Kubernetes Services.

You can create and edit dashboards and create your own copy to modify them without editing the original. You can also tag the dashboards.

Limitations

• Preview limitations. Support for Grafana Explore, Dashboard links and Exemplars isn't yet available.
• Unsupported features. Grafana evaluated alerts, reports, library panels, snapshots, playlists, app plugins, and copying panels across different dashboards.

Managed Grafana

You can monitor Azure services and applications by using Grafana and the included Azure Monitor data source plug-in. The plug-in retrieves data from these Azure services:

• Azure Monitor Metrics for numeric time series data from Azure resources.
• Azure Monitor Logs for log and performance data from Azure resources that enables you to query by using the powerful Kusto Query Language (KQL). You can use Application Insights log queries to retrieve Application Insights log-based metrics.
  • Application Insights log-based metrics to let you analyze the health of your monitored apps. You can use Application Insights log queries in Grafana to use the Application Insights log metrics data.
• Azure Monitor Traces to query and visualize distributed tracing data from Application Insights.
• Azure Resource Graph to quickly query and identify Azure resources across subscriptions.

You can also use the Grafana Prometheus plugin to query and visualize data from Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus. For more information, see Connect Grafana to Azure Monitor Prometheus metrics.

You can then display this performance and availability data on your Grafana dashboard.

Managed Grafana related content

The following is a list of related managed Grafana documentation.

Containers

• Monitor Kubernetes
• Enable monitoring for Kubernetes clusters, Enable Prometheus, and Grafana
• Default Grafana dashboard configuration for Prometheus
• Container insights log schema, Install Grafana dashboard
• Importing specific Grafana dashboards
  • Argo CD
  • Elastisearch
  • Istio
  • Kafka

Metrics

• Link to a Grafana dashboard in a an Azure Monitor workspace
• Connect Grafana to Azure Monitor Prometheus metrics

System Center Operations Manager(SCOM)

• Dashboards on Azure Managed Grafana
• Query Azure Monitor SCOM Managed Instance data from Azure Managed Grafana dashboards

When to use

Choose Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana if you store observability and telemetry data exclusively in Azure.

Choose managed Grafana if you need access to external data sources and automation, including open-source and Grafana enterprise data sources, Grafana alerts, scheduled reports, and the ability to share access to dashboards without sharing access to the underlying data store.

Solution comparison

Next steps

• Use Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana
• Use Manged Grafana