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Azure Monitor pricing

Full observability into your applications, infrastructure, and network

Azure Monitor maximizes the availability and performance of your applications and services by delivering a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your cloud and on-premises environments. It helps you understand how your applications are performing and proactively identifies issues affecting them and the resources they depend on.

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Prices are estimates only and are not intended as actual price quotes. Actual pricing may vary depending on the type of agreement entered with Microsoft, date of purchase, and the currency exchange rate. Prices are calculated based on US dollars and converted using London closing spot rates that are captured in the two business days prior to the last business day of the previous month end. If the two business days prior to the end of the month fall on a bank holiday in major markets, the rate setting day is generally the day immediately preceding the two business days. This rate applies to all transactions during the upcoming month. Sign in to the Azure pricing calculator to see pricing based on your current program/offer with Microsoft. Contact an Azure sales specialist for more information on pricing or to request a price quote. See frequently asked questions about Azure pricing.

Azure Monitor includes functionality for the collection and analysis of log data (billed by data ingestion, retention, and export), monitoring of availability via web tests, export of platform logs data from Azure resources, collection of metrics, alerts, and notifications. Features of Azure Monitor that are automatically enabled such as collection of standard metrics and activity logs are provided at no cost. Also available at no additional cost are the advanced monitoring capabilities that use your ingested data (see Insights and core solutions).

Ingestion

Azure Monitor Logs charge for data ingested. We offer 3 log ingestion plans – Auxiliary Logs, Basic Logs, and Analytics Logs. A typical customer would use a combination of all plans for different tables in the workspace. For more details on the log plans see here.

Not available Plan Capabilities Pricing Tier Price Effective Per GB Price1 Savings Over Pay-As-You-Go
Auxiliary Logs
  • 30 days of retention included; can be extended up to 12 years3
  • 30 days interactive query; query older data using search jobs
  • Full KQL on a single table and lookup to Analytics tables
  • Summary rules
 Pay-As-You-Go $- per GB2 $- per GB2 N/A
Basic Logs
  • 30 days of retention included; can be extended up to 12 years
  • 30 days interactive query; query older data using search jobs
  • Fast query performance with full KQL on a single table and lookup to Analytics tables
  • Summary rules
 Pay-As-You-Go $- per GB $- per GB N/A
Analytics Logs
  • 31/90 days of retention included; can be extended up to 12 years
  • Up to 2 years interactive query; query older data using search jobs
  • Query cost included
  • Fast query performance with full KQL support
  • Out-of-the-box insights
  • Alerting
  • Summary rules
 Pay-As-You-Go4 $- per GB $- per GB N/A
100 GB per day $- per day $- per GB $-
200 GB per day $- per day $- per GB $-
300 GB per day $- per day $- per GB $-
400 GB per day $- per day $- per GB $-
500 GB per day $- per day $- per GB $-
1,000 GB per day $- per day $- per GB $-
2,000 GB per day $- per day $- per GB $-
5,000 GB per day $- per day $- per GB $-
10,000 GB per day $- per day $- per GB $-
25,000 GB per day $- per day $- per GB $-
50,000 GB per day $- per day $- per GB $-

1Data size is measured in GB (10^9 bytes). Details of its calculation are available for Log Analytics and Application Insights.
2Billing for the Auxiliary Logs plan (currently in preview) is not yet enabled. Details on billing start date will be announced on Azure Updates. For current users of the feature, advanced notice will be given before billing starts.
3This capability is not yet enabled in Auxiliary Logs (currently public preview).
4The first 5 GB/month per billing account in this tier are free.

Extended Retention

Data ingested into your Log Analytics workspace can be retained at no charge for:

  • 30 days – data ingested into Basic Logs and Auxiliary Logs
  • 31 days – data ingested into Analytics Logs
  • 90 days – data ingested into Analytics Logs if Microsoft Sentinel is enabled on the workspace
  • 90 days – data ingested into either classic or workspace-based Application Insights

Data retained beyond these no-charge periods will be charged for each GB of data retained for a month (pro-rated daily).

Feature Ingestion plan Retention period Price
Interactive Retention Analytics Up to 2 years $- per GB per month
Long-term Retention Analytics, Basic, and Auxiliary1 Up to 12 years $- per GB per month

1Billing for the Auxiliary Logs plan (currently in preview), including long-term retention, is not yet enabled. Details on billing start date will be announced on Azure Updates. For current users of the feature, advanced notice will be given before billing starts.

Query

Querying Basic or Auxiliary Logs in Azure Monitor is chargeable per below. Querying Analytics Logs is free of charge.
Please note that there is no additional cost for Summary rules—you only pay for the query and the ingestion of results to the destination table. See more details.

Feature Price
Query1 $- per GB of data scanned

1Billing for the Auxiliary Logs plan (currently in preview) is not yet enabled. Details on billing start date will be announced on Azure Updates. For current users of the feature, advanced notice will be given before billing starts.

Search Jobs

Search jobs incur a cost for the data scanned plus the cost of ingesting the search results (per the normal Log Data Ingestion prices). Learn more about search jobs.

Feature Price
Search Job1 $- per GB of data scanned2

1Billing for search jobs on logs ingested into the Auxiliary Logs plan (currently in preview) is not yet enabled. Details on billing start date will be announced on Azure Updates. For current users of the feature, advanced notice will be given before billing starts.
2Data scanned for Basic and Auxiliary tables will include the scanned GB from the whole search, while for Analytics tables it includes only the scanned GB of the search on the long-term retention period (exclude first 31/90 days, and extended data retention).

Export

Log Analytics Data Export bills per GB of data exported from the Log Analytics Workspace. Exporting data via Diagnostic Settings is covered below in the Platform Logs section of this page.

Feature Price
Log Analytics Data Export1 $- per GB2

1Data Export on Auxiliary Logs (currently in preview) is not yet enabled.

2The size of data exported by Log Analytics Data Export is the number of bytes in the exported JSON formatted data. 1 GB = 10^9 bytes.

Log Processing

Logs ingested into Azure Monitor can be processed with powerful, customer-defined data collection transformations.1

Feature Included Amounts Price
Log Processing There is no ingestion and transformation charge for data emitted to at least one Log Analytics workspace unless more than 50% of the data is modified or filtered out by data collection transformations.2 There is also no charge when the data is emitted to at least one Log Analytics workspace that has Azure Sentinel. $- per GB per Data Collection Rule

1Details on billing start date will be announced on Azure Updates. For current users of the feature, advanced notice will be given before billing starts. Data collection transformation on Auxiliary Logs is not yet available.

2When more than 50% of logs are filtered out by customer-defined data collection transformations, only the logs filtered above the 50% threshold will be billed. Data ingestion and transformation GBs are aggregated over a 24 hour time frame (on the UTC time zone). Refer to our documentation for more details and examples.

Platform Logs

Platform logs provide detailed diagnostic and auditing information for Azure resources. For platform logs, you pay for the volume of data processed and sent to each destination, at the prices listed below.

Feature Destination Price
Data processed to stream platform logs Logs Analytics workspace Included in Log Analytics data ingestion charges
Storage or Event Hub1 $- per GB2
Marketplace Partners $- per GB2

1Exporting a select set of platform logs to Storage or Event Hub is available at no charge. See the list of freely exportable platform logs.

2Billing for streaming platform logs started on February 1, 2022. The size of the streamed Platform Logs is the number of bytes in the exported JSON formatted data. 1 GB = 10^9 bytes.

Workspace Replication

Log Analytics Workspace Replication increases the resilience of your workspace to regional issues. Please note that Auxiliary Logs are not currently supported in Log Analytics Workspace Replication.

Workspace Replication bills by the volume of data replicated.

Feature Price
Log Analytics Workspace Replication $- per GB

Restore

Logs in the long-term retention period that were originally ingested to Analytics or Basic can be restored to enable full interactive analytics query capabilities. Maintaining restored logs incurs a pro-rated cost per day. There is no charge for querying against restored logs. Learn more about restore.

Feature Price
Data Restore $- per GB per day (2 TB, 12 hour minimum)1

1If a restore is kept for less than 12 hours, the restore will be billed for a 12-hour minimum duration. If less than 2 TB of data is restored, the billed volume of restored data will be rounded up to 2 TB for each day (or partial day) that the restore is retained.

Web Tests

Application Insights has Standard web tests, URL Ping tests and Multi-step web tests which enable you to verify the availability of your application.

Feature Price
Standard web tests $- per scheduled test execution
Ping web tests Free
Multi-step web tests1 $- per test per month

1Multi-step web tests are prorated daily for each test that is active, independent of the number of locations from which the test is run or the test execution frequency. Charges for alert rules and notifications are separate and charged per pricing below.

Native Metrics

Native metrics include platform and custom metrics. Costs for custom metrics are based on the number of samples ingested and the number of API calls made for query. Platform and custom metrics are retained for 90 days. Billing is not yet enabled for custom metrics.

Feature Free units included Price
Platform Metrics Ingestion1 Unlimited Free
Custom metrics ingestion (preview)1 None $- / 10 million samples ingested
Platform and custom metric queries (preview) First 1,000,000 API calls per month $- / 1,000 API calls

1Platform metrics are ingested for free per billing account and include select metrics originating from Azure resources, services and first party solutions. See the list of standard metrics.

Managed service for Prometheus Metrics

Costs for Prometheus metrics are based on the number of samples ingested and processed for queries. The metrics ingestion cost includes 18 months of data retention.

Feature Price
Metrics ingestion $- / 10 million samples ingested
Metrics queries1 $- / 10 million samples processed

1Samples processed is the total number of data points queried using Prometheus Query Language (PromQL) for a given time range. Prometheus metrics alert pricing is based solely on the metrics preview pricing.

Export

The cost for exporting metrics through Data Collection Rules is based on the total number of metrics samples processed. Currently, only platform metrics are exportable with this service.

Feature Price
Metrics Export $-/1,000 metrics samples processed*

*Samples processed is the total number of metrics datapoints exported.

Alert rules

An alert rule is charged based on the type and number of signals it monitors. A signal can be a resource metric, a log, or an activity log. The cost of an alert rule that monitors multiple signals is the sum of the cost of monitoring each signal and any enabled features. Metric alert rules are billed per each time series monitored. Log alert rules are billed by the interval at which the query is executed. If the query results in multiple dimensions (at-scale log monitoring), there is an additional charge for each dimension (time series) that is evaluated. There is no charge for Activity Log alert rules or other alert rules when they are disabled. For more details on alert rule billing, see the Alerts section of the FAQ below.

Alert Type Free units included Alert rule price
(Monthly)		 Time Series Price
(Monthly)		 Additional cost for metric alert w/ dynamic threshold14
Activity Log Alert Limited to 100 rules per subscription N/A N/A N/A
Native Metrics11, 12 10 monitored metric time-series per month13 N/A $- $-
Managed service for Prometheus Metrics Prometheus Metrics alerts are only charged the cost for the Prometheus Metrics query (see above). N/A N/A N/A
Log Alert (15 minute frequency) First time-series is included in the log alert rule $- $- N/A
Log Alert (10 minute frequency) First time-series is included in the log alert rule $- $- N/A
Log Alert (5 minute frequency) First time-series is included in the log alert rule $- $- N/A
Log Alert (1 minute frequency) First time-series is included in the log alert rule $- $- N/A

11Price listed here represents the price of an alert rule monitoring a single metric time-series originating from a single resource.

12Pricing is applicable to the new generation metric alert rules available under Alerts, previous generation alert rules (Alerts Classic) will continue to be available at no charge

  • Activity logs are available for a 90-day period at no charge. To retain activity log data beyond the 90-day period, activity log data can be routed to a storage account or event hubs. Corresponding charges will apply for storage and event hubs, respectively. No charges are incurred for API calls to pull activity log data.
  • Alerts offered as part of Azure Security Center (ASC) are not currently charged.

13Pricing of at scale log monitoring is applicable from Scheduled Query Rules API version 2021-02-01, once that version is generally available

14A dynamic alert is billed for the dynamic threshold capability and the underlying metric alert.

Notifications

Notifications are sent based on when an Alert rule triggers. You are billed based on the type and number of notifications you choose to send.

Feature Free units included Price
ITSM connector create or update event 1,000 events per month $-/1,000 events
Emails 1,000 emails per month $-/100,000 emails
Push notification (to Azure Mobile App) 1,000 notifications per month $-/100,000 notifications
Secure web hooks 1 secure web hook $-/1,000,000 secure web hooks
Web hooks 100,000 web hooks per month $-/1,000,000 web hooks

SMS and Voice calls See next table for SMS pricing

Country Code Voice Calls Price SMS Price
United States (+1)
Australia (+61) $-/SMS
Austria (+43) $-/SMS
Belgium (+32) $-/SMS
Brazil (+55) $-/SMS

SCOM managed instance

Costs for Azure Monitor SCOM managed instance is based on number of endpoints.

Note: All charges associated with the consumption of Azure resources for running SCOM MI will be billed separately on a Pay-As-You-Go basis, in addition to the specified SCOM MI price below. See here for an architecture of the SCOM MI service hosted in Azure.

Feature Price
Endpoints monitored with SCOM MI $- per endpoint / month

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Additional resources

Azure Monitor

Learn more about Azure Monitor features and capabilities.

Pricing calculator

Estimate your expected monthly costs for using any combination of Azure products.

SLA

Review the Service Level Agreement for Azure Monitor.

Documentation

Review technical tutorials, videos, and more Azure Monitor resources.

Frequently asked questions

Frequently asked questions about Azure pricing

General

  • There are no additional charges for Azure Monitor features that are in preview and not listed on the pricing page. Pricing for features that are in preview will be announced in the future and a notice provided prior to start of billing. Should you choose to continue using preview features after the notice period, you will be billed at the applicable rate.
  • Our billable data volume is defined only as the size of the data that will be stored and excludes a set of standard columns and any JSON wrapper that was part of the data received for ingestion. Thus, the billable data volume is substantially smaller than the size of the entire JSON-packaged event, often less than 50%. To understand this calculation of billed data size when estimating costs learn more here.
  • Yes; Azure Activity Logs is one such example of a data type that is free from ingestion charges. To learn more, read here.

Log Analytics

  • Commitment Tiers allow you to reserve a fixed amount of daily data ingestion capacity for Azure Monitor and Azure Sentinel for a fixed, predictable daily fee. You can upgrade your requested tier level at any time. However, the minimum commitment period before you can opt out or reduce your capacity reservation is 31 days.

    • Moving to a larger tier level: you can upgrade your level at any time. Your new tier will be effective at 12:01 AM UST on the following day.
    • Reducing your selected capacity reservation: you can reduce your tier level or opt out entirely from the Commitment Tier pricing after the first 31 days. This 31-day clock resets every time you make any change (increase or decrease) to your selected tier level. Your new pricing tier choice will be effective at 12:01 AM UST on the following day.

      • Learn more about Log Analytics pricing models and Commitment Tiers.

  • Yes. Using Log Analytics Dedicated Clusters, you can move multiple workspaces into a cluster, and thus potentially take advantage of a larger Commitment Tier and it’s lower cost per GB. Learn more about billing options and requirements for Log Analytics Dedicated Clusters.

  • You can select a retention period up to 730 days. The retention cost is calculated on a daily granularity based on the monthly price per GB stored beyond the free days of retention (31 days) except for Application Insights data, and workspaces that have Azure Sentinel enabled. Learn about options for managing data retention.

  • Subscriptions that contained a Log Analytics workspace or Application Insights resource on April 2, 2018, or are linked to an Enterprise Agreement that started before February 1, 2019 and is still active, will continue to have access to use the legacy pricing tiers: Standalone (Per GB), and Per Node (OMS). Creating new workspaces in (or moving existing workspaces into) the Free Trial pricing tier is possible until July 1, 2022. Workspaces in the Free Trial pricing tier have daily data ingestion limited to 500 MB (except for security data types collected by Microsoft Defender for Servers) and the data retention is limited to seven days. The Free Trial pricing tier is intended only for evaluation purposes and has no Service Level Agreement. Workspaces in the Standalone or Per Node pricing tiers have user-configurable retention from 30 to 730 days. Learn more about legacy pricing tiers.

  • The decision of whether workspaces with access to the legacy Per Node pricing tier are better off in that tier or in a current Pay-As-You-Go or Commitment Tier is often difficult for customers to assess. This involves understanding the trade-off between the fixed cost per monitored node in the Per Node pricing tier and its included data allocation of 500 MB/node/day and the cost of just paying for ingested data in the Pay-As-You-Go (Per GB) tier. To evaluate this, use the pricing tier recommendation query.

  • Yes, workspaces created before October 1, 2016 can continue use the Standard or Premium pricing tiers but can switch at any time to a newer tier above. The pricing tier below have not been available to any new workspaces since October 1, 2016.

    Not available Standard Premium
    Daily limit None None
    Retention period 1 month 12 months
    Customize longer retention periods Not available Not available
    Price $2.3 per GB $3.5 per GB

Application Insights

  • The older pricing model offered two tiers—Basic, and Enterprise.

    Enterprise tier customers can continue to stay on the older pricing model or can switch at any time to the above pricing model. All customer subscriptions with Application Insights enabled before April 2, 2018, are billed $- per GB for any data ingested by Application Insights. However, the only situation where this is advantageous if you’ve purchased the OMS Suite. In this case, each purchased unit of the Operations Management Suite E1 and E2 plans includes an entitlement to one node of the Enterprise tier of Application Insights. Each Application Insights Enterprise node includes up to 200 MB of Application Insights data ingested per day, with 90-day data retention at no additional cost.

    Not available Enterprise
    Base monthly price $- per node
    Included data 200 MB per node each day
    Additional data $- per GB

  • No. Customers who started using Application Insights before April 2, 2018, will continue to be billed $- per GB for any data ingested by Application Insights.

  • You can set a daily cap on the amount of data that Application Insights will accept from your application, allowing you to control your costs. After the daily cap has been reached, excess data will be ignored for the remainder of the day (in UTC time), and then will resume normally at the start of the next day.

    Additionally, you can use sampling to reduce the amount of data you send to Application Insights from your application.

    Learn more about managing pricing and data volume in Application Insights.

  • Yes, you may incur additional network costs which will vary depending on the region the telemetry is coming from and where it is going. Refer to the Azure Bandwidth pricing for details.

Metrics

  • Billing for Azure Metrics API queries is based on individual API requests used to fetch metric data from Azure resources. The quantity of requested metrics contributes to the cost of each API call.

    Metrics Data plane API provides a certain number of free API (1M calls) per subscription per month, with any additional calls beyond the allowance billed according to the pricing specified on this Azure Monitor pricing page.

    For the Data plane batch end point, you can query up to 50 resource IDs of same resource type in the same region and same subscription in a single API call.

  • Azure Platform Metrics: 93 days. To retain for longer, customers are encouraged to use Diagnostic Settings to export data to an LA workspace or Event Hub or Storage account where longer retention can be configured.

    Azure Monitor Workspace metrics: 18 months.

Alerts

  • The price of an alert rule which monitors the CPU utilization, and RAM usage (i.e. 2 metric time-series) for 10 VMs, and has dynamic threshold enabled, can be calculated as, Price of alert rule + Price of dynamic threshold. For this example, the price would be calculated as:

    Total monthly price = (10 VMs * 2 metric time-series per VM – 10 free units) * price per metric time-series per month + [(10 VMs * 2 metric time-series per VM) *price per dynamic threshold per month]

  • The price of an alert rule which queries 1 resource event every 15-minutes can be calculated as,

    Total monthly price = 1 resource * 1 log alert rule * price per 15-minute internal log alert rule per month

  • The price of an alert rule which monitors 10 VM resources at 1-minute frequency, using resource centric log monitoring, can be calculated as Price of alert rule + Price of number of dimensions.

    Total monthly price = price per 1-minute log alert rule per month + ( 10 time series - 1 included free time series ) * price per 1-min interval monitored per month

    Pricing of at scale log monitoring is applicable from Scheduled Query Rules API version 2021-02-01

  • The migrated alert rules and corresponding migrated action groups (email, webhook, or LogicApp) will remain free of charge. The functionality you had with classic alerts including the ability to edit the threshold, aggregation type, and the aggregation granularity will continue to be available for free with your migrated alert rule. However, if you edit the migrated alert rule to use any of the new alert platform features, notifications or action types, a corresponding charge will apply. The following are examples of cases where you will incur a charge for your alert rule:

    • Any new (non-migrated) alert rule created beyond free units, on the new Azure Monitor platform
    • Any data ingested and retained beyond free units included by Azure Monitor
    • Any multi-test web tests executed by Application Insights
    • Any custom metrics stored beyond free units included in Azure Monitor
    • Any migrated alert rules that are edited to use newer metric alert features like frequency, multiple resources/dimensions, Dynamic Thresholds, changing resource/signal, and so on
    • Any migrated action groups that are edited to use newer notifications, or action types like SMS, Voice Call and/or ITSM integration

  • Activity log, service health and resource health alert rules continue to be available at no charge.

  • Alert notifications are charged separately based on the type of notification used.

  • You will not be charged for the first 250 log alert rules with frequency 5 minutes or more for the duration of your Enterprise Agreement in effect at the above dates. Any alert rules above the 250 log alert rules limit or lower than 5 minutes frequency will be billed per the prices listed above.

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