• 3 min read

New features and insights in Azure Monitor

Over the past few months, we have released many new capabilities targeting to improve native integration with Azure, enable easier onboarding at scale, support enterprise security and compliance needs, provide rich full stack distributed tracing, and much more.

Customers need full stack observability for their apps and infrastructure across Azure and hybrid environments to ensure their workloads are always up and running, for which they rely on Azure Monitor. Over the past few months, we have released many new capabilities targeting to improve native integration with Azure, enable easier onboarding at scale, support enterprise security and compliance needs, provide rich full stack distributed tracing, and much more. In this blog, we’re sharing the newest enhancements from Azure Monitor announced at Microsoft Build, including:

  1. Preview of Azure Monitor Application Insights logs being available directly on Log Analytics Workspaces.  
  2. General availability of Azure Monitor for Storage and Azure Cosmos DB, with previews for Key Vault and Azure Cache for Redis.

Be sure to read through the blog post to learn about the full list of announcements at the end.

Application Insights on Log Analytics Workspaces

Logs from Application Insights could previously only be stored separately for each monitored application, and you had to resort to cross-workspace queries to correlate with logs in Log Analytics Workspaces. Continuing the integration of Application Insights with Log Analytics, we are announcing a preview of a major milestone today in our Application Performance Management (APM) story. You can now choose to send your Application Insights logs to a common Log Analytics Workspace, keeping application, infrastructure, and platform logs altogether.

  Application Insights configuration with Log Analytics Workspace
This would let you apply common role-based access control across your resources and not have to worry about cross-application or workspace queries anymore (even the Application Insights logs schema is now integrated and made consistent with other data tables in Log Analytics).

Application Insights Data Schema 

You will now be able to export both your metrics and logs data to firewalled Azure Storage accounts or stream to Azure Event Hub via Diagnostic Settings. Note that exporting to Storage or Event Hub is a premium feature that would start getting billed once it reaches general availability. You can also start optimizing cost through reserved capacity pricing at workspace level with Log Analytics.

One of the biggest benefits with this upgrade is that you will now be able to easily drive enterprise readiness for your application logs, with all the new enhancements coming soon in Azure Monitor Logs (including Customer Managed Key Encryption, Network Isolation with Private Link support, Business Continuity Disaster Recovery with Globally Distributed Workspaces, High Availability with Availability Zones, Global Availability with Satellite Regions, and much more).

Out-of-the-box insights for Azure Resources

Customers have asked us to provide more out of the insights like the ones we provide for virtual machines, containers, and network. We are now happy to provide you out of the box insights on more Azure resources using the platform metrics that Azure Monitor already collects. These insights are built on workbooks which is a platform for creating and sharing rich interactive reports. You can access any of these insights out-of-the-box and customize it even further. These can be accessed either directly from an individual resource blade, or at scale from Azure Monitor blade in Azure Portal.

Azure Monitor for Storage is now generally available, offering comprehensive monitoring of your Azure Storage accounts covering insights across health and capacity, with the ability to focus on hotspots and help you diagnose latency, throttling, and availability issues.
   Azure Monitor for Storage
Azure Monitor for Azure Cosmos DB is also now GA, where you can access insights on usage, failures, capacity, throughput, and operations for your Azure Cosmos DB resources across subscriptions.
   Azure Monitor for Azure Cosmos DB
We also announced previews of Azure Monitor for Key Vault and Azure Monitor for Azure Cache for Redis which will provide similar out-of-the-box insights for these resources, helping you use them optimally.

More enhancements

In addition to the two highlights above, here are other exciting announcements from Microsoft Build:

Next steps with Azure Monitor

To learn more about Azure Monitor and monitoring best practices, check out the documentation and recorded sessions from our recent virtual series. If you have any questions or suggestions, reach out to us through our Tech Community forum.