azure monitor costs - insight

Question

Hello good

Could someone please confirm for me, if there is a cost to activate VM monitoring in Azure Monitor, to only visualize the consumption of resources in Insight?

I understand that there is no cost to visualize this consumption, through insight with Monitor.

If there is a cost for the collection and storage of data and information of that consumption of resources.

Thank you

Answer 1

Yes, there is a cost associated with activating VM monitoring in Azure Monitor. While visualizing resource consumption through insights in Azure Monitor is generally free, there are costs involved in the collection and storage of data and information related to resource consumption. The specific cost depends on factors such as the amount of data collected, the retention period. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/monitor/#pricing

Answer 2

@Fernando Gutierrez , Thank you for the question.

As Tushar mentioned, there is no direct cost associated with the monitoring of resources. However, Azure Monitor uses a consumption-based pricing model. With this billing model, you only pay for what you use. Features of Azure Monitor that are enabled by default don't incur any charge. These features include collection and alerting on the Activity log and collection and analysis of platform metrics.

Several other features don't have a direct cost, but instead you pay for the ingestion and retention of data that they collect. For more details, please see Azure Monitor Pricing model.

Based on my understanding about the question in your follow-up comment,

1. The cost occurs when you enable additional monitoring than what is available by default. For example, for any resource (say a VM), some of the metrics are collected by default and stored in Azure Monitor Metrics. You can view these metrics using the "Monitor" -> "Metrics" menu. These are stored for a shorter duration. If you install agent on VMs OR enable Diagnostic Settings to forward the metrics/logs to any destination (like Log Analytics workspace, storage account etc.), such ingestion and storage will have some additional costs as availale here - Azure Monitor pricing
2. I am not sure of the second question, but there is some inbuilt monitoring already available in Azure, which is enabled by default. Only when you enable additional logging/collection/storage is when you incur additional charges. Please see point 1 for more details.

Hope this helps. If you have further questions, please feel free to share additional context/scenarios or examples so that we can help you.