AKS Monitoring - Questions about Azure Monitor, Grafana and Prometheus
Hi, We have a Kubernetes platform on which we are developing our microservices. To start working on monitoring, we have some important questions. We want to monitor from the status of the nodes of the AKS clusters as the status of the pods (status, if they are not started, etc.). If we go to an AKS cluster to 'Monitoring - Insights' we see a lot of information, but we want to have dashboards and, most importantly, alerts. On the one hand, it is possible to create alerts in the Azure portal itself and also dashboards. On the other hand, we see that the Microsoft documentation indicates how to configure 'Azure Managed Grafana'. And finally, we have Prometheus which in turn displays dashboards using Grafana. Our biggest question is: What do both Grafana and Prometheus contribute? Do we get more information with Prometheus than we get with Azure Insights? Grafana we see that it already brings many pre-created dashboards for many parts of Azure, as well as pre-created alerts. Is it worth using 'Azure Grafana Managed' or if you don't want to pay for the service, use Azure Monitor for everything? Thanks!!
Are you getting the most out of your Azure Log Analytics Workspace (LAW) investment?
Using a LAW is a great way to consolidate various types of data (performance, events, security, etc.) and signals from multiple sources. That's the easy part - mining this data for actionable insights is often the real challenge. One way we did this was by surfacing events related to disks across our physical server estate. We were already sending event data to our LAW; it was just a matter of parsing it with KQL and adding to a Power Bi dashboard for additional visibility. The snippet from the Power Bi dashboard shows when the alert was first triggered and when the disk was eventually replaced. Here's the KQL query we came up with. let start_time=ago(30d); let end_time=now(); Event | where TimeGenerated > start_time and TimeGenerated < end_time | where EventLog contains 'System' | where Source contains 'Storage Agents' | where RenderedDescription contains 'Drive Array Physical Drive Status Change' | parse kind=relaxed RenderedDescription with * 'Drive Array Physical Drive Status Change. The ' Drive ' with serial number ""' Serial '"", has a new status of ' Status '. (Drive status values:'* | project Computer, Drive, Serial, Status, TimeGenerated, EventLevelName You can of course set up alerting with Alerts for Azure Monitor. I hope this example helps you get more value from your LAW.
