Making Azure the Best Place to Observe Your Apps with OpenTelemetry
Our goal is to make Azure the most observable cloud. To that end, we are refactoring Azure’s native observability platform to be based on OpenTelemetry, an industry standard for instrumenting applications and transmitting telemetry.How to leverage Azure Monitor to meet functional and non-functional requirements - No.1 overview
Azure Monitor can be used for centralized monitoring and analysis of log data by using Kusto query, thus Azure Monitor allows you to effectively monitor and visualize Azure resources. Azure Arc also empowers Azure Monitor to expand its capability to on-premise and other public clouds. You can monitor every resources across environments, Azure, AWS, GCP, OCI, on-premise and others, with Azure Monitor and Azure Arc, then Azure Monitor minimize your effort to manage all the resources regardless locations or environments. Azure Monitor is a very powerful solution, but customers and partners sometimes have a challenge to map Azure Monitor features to their functional and non-functional requirements. These series articles describe how to use various Azure Monitor features in terms of functional and non-functional requirements. This article answers how to meet the requirements by using Azure Monitor.Identify and solve performance issues faster with App Insights Code Optimizations
The integration of Code Optimizations with Microsoft Copilot for Azure and GitHub Copilot enables seamless integration between operations teams identifying performance bottlenecks in running .NET applications on Azure, and developers remediating them faster on code level in Visual Studio Code.Azure Managed Grafana Brings Grafana 11 and More
We’re thrilled to announce the public preview of Grafana 11 and several feature enhancements in Azure Managed Grafana based on your feedback. We continue to evolve our service to deliver what matters most to our customers. Grafana 11 This annual major update to Grafana includes new functionality and improvements across dashboards, panels, queries, and alerts. The current preview in Managed Grafana offers Grafana v11.2. It includes the following key features: Explore Metrics Scenes powered dashboards Subfolders Numerous improvements to canvas visualization and alerting For more information on Grafana 11, please refer What’s new in Grafana v11.0, v11.1, and v11.2 and consider how the breaking changes may impact your specific use cases. You’ll need to create a new Managed Grafana instance to use Grafana 11 preview. Upgrading from Grafana 10 directly isn’t supported yet. You can copy over dashboards from your current Managed Grafana instance by following the steps in Migrate to Azure Managed Grafana. Please note that not all Grafana 11 features are available in Managed Grafana at present; if applicable, more features will be added over time. Azure Monitor Updates for Grafana 11 Improved Azure Monitor Logs visualizations This update extends Azure Monitor logs visualizations to support Basic Logs. This enables you to view Azure Monitor Log tables that have been configured with the lower cost Basic Log tier in Explore and dashboard panels. Additionally, Azure Monitor Logs details can now be viewed in Grafana Explore and Logs panels. You can filter query results by column values, run ad-hoc statistics and choose which column to display using simple point and click interaction without needing to modify the query text. Explore views also include options to view JSON data in dynamic columns. Azure Kubernetes Service users can leverage these views in a new Container Log dashboard. Prometheus Exemplars support for Azure Monitor Application Insight traces You can now drill down from Prometheus exemplars to Application Insights traces in Grafana. Using Exemplars in your troubleshooting workflow improves triage and analysis response times by allowing you to navigate from metrics to sample traces related to errors and exceptions and easily compare performance of transactions. To take advantage of this capability, the application needs to be instrumented to emit Prometheus metrics with Exemplars and traces to Azure Monitor Application Insights. Sign up for the Private Preview of Exemplars support in your Azure Monitor Workspace. User-Assigned Managed Identity Since its inception, Managed Grafana sets up a system-assigned managed identity for a new Grafana workspace by default. You can use this managed identity as the security principal to access backend data sources connected to your workspace. While it’s convenient to use, system-assigned managed identity isn’t always suitable. Enterprise customers who have stricter identity management policies typically create and manage all Entra ID identities by themselves. Managed Grafana now allows these customers to use identities defined in their Entra ID tenants instead. With the user-assigned managed identity feature, you can select an existing Entra ID identity to be used for authentication and authorization with your data sources. Please note that you can choose only one type of managed identity for each workspace. You can’t enable both system-assigned and user-assigned managed identities simultaneously. Grafana Settings Grafana server settings allow you to customize specific server behaviors. Managed Grafana configures and manages these settings automatically, so you don’t have to deal with them. There are some settings where usage varies from user to user. Managed Grafana now gives you the option to change their default values. The currently supported ones are: viewers_can_edit – determines whether users with the Grafana Viewer role can edit dashboards external_enabled – controls the public sharing of snapshots Grafana Migration Tool If you have a self-hosted Grafana server on-premises or in the cloud that you’d like to migrate to Managed Grafana, you can perform this operation with one command in the Azure CLI. The new az grafana migrate command automates the process of copying your existing dashboards from any Grafana server to your Managed Grafana workspace. It supports several options that control how the content migration should be conducted as well as a dry-run option for you to test and see the migration results before committing to the operation. Let Us Know How We’re Doing If you’re a current user of Managed Grafana, we’d love to hear from you. Please take a moment and fill out this online survey. It will help us further improve our service to better serve you. Thank you!Optimizing Cost using the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro
Immediately after Willow deployed the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro, their Azure Costs spiked, and they approached Azure Monitor Team for strategies to optimize cost. By following the strategies in this blog, they were able to reduce costs by over 90%!Announcing the Public Preview of Code Optimizations
Code Optimizations: A New AI-Based Service for .NET Performance Optimization We are thrilled to announce that Code Optimizations (previously known as Optimization Insights) is now available in public preview! This new AI-based service can identify performance issues and offer recommendations specifically tailored for .NET applications and cloud services. What is Code Optimizations? Code Optimizations is a service within Application Insights that continuously analyzes profiler traces from your application or cloud service and provides insights and recommendations on how to improve its performance. Code Optimizations can help you identify and solve a wide range of performance issues, ranging from incorrect API usages and unnecessary allocations all the way to issues relating to exceptions and concurrency. It can also detect anomalies whenever your application or cloud service exhibits abnormal CPU or Memory behavior. Why should I use Code Optimizations? Code Optimizations can help you optimize the performance of your .NET applications and cloud services by: Saving you time and effort: Instead of manually sifting through gigabytes of profiler data or relying on trial-and-error methods, you can use Code Optimizations to automatically uncover complex performance bugs and get guidance on how to solve them. Improving your user experience: By improving the speed and reliability of your application or cloud service, you can enhance your user satisfaction and retention rates. This can also help you gain a competitive edge over other apps or services in your market. Saving you money: By fixing performance issues early and efficiently, you can reduce the need for scaling out cloud resources or paying for unnecessary compute power. This can help you avoid problems such as cloud sprawling or overspending on your Azure bill. How does Code Optimizations work? Code Optimizations relies on an AI model trained on thousands of traces collected from Microsoft-owned services around the globe. By learning from these traces, the model can glean patterns corresponding to various performance issues seen in .NET applications and learn from the expertise of performance engineers at Microsoft. This enables our AI model to pinpoint with accuracy a wide range of performance issues in your app and provide you with actionable recommendations on how to fix them. Code Optimizations runs at no additional cost to you and is completely offline to the app. It has no impact on your app’s performance. How can I use Code Optimizations? If you are interested in trying out this new service for free during its public preview period, you can access it using the following steps: Sign up for Application Insights if you haven't already. Application Insights is a powerful application performance monitoring (APM) tool that helps you monitor, diagnose, and troubleshoot your apps. Enable profiling for your .NET app or cloud service. Profiling collects detailed information about how your app executes at runtime. Navigate to the Application Insights Performance blade from the left navigation pane under Investigate and select Code Optimizations from the top menu. Click here for the documentation. Click here for information on troubleshooting. Click here for videos on how to set up and use Code Optimizations. Fill out this quick survey if you have any additional issues or questions.
