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Azure Monitor workspace

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An Azure Monitor workspace is a unique environment for data collected by Azure Monitor. Each workspace has its own data repository, configuration, and permissions.

Note

Log Analytics workspaces contain logs and metrics data from multiple Azure resources, whereas Azure Monitor workspaces currently contain only metrics related to Prometheus.

Contents of Azure Monitor workspace

Azure Monitor workspaces will eventually contain all metric data collected by Azure Monitor. Currently, only Prometheus metrics are data hosted in an Azure Monitor workspace.

Azure Monitor workspace architecture

While a single Azure Monitor workspace can be sufficient for many use cases using Azure Monitor, many organizations create multiple workspaces to better meet their needs. This article presents a set of criteria for deciding whether to use a single Azure Monitor workspace, multiple Azure Monitor workspaces, and the configuration and placement of those workspaces.

Design criteria

As you identify the right criteria to create additional Azure Monitor workspaces, your design should use the lowest number of workspaces that will match your requirements, while optimizing for minimal administrative management overhead.

The following table presents criteria to consider when designing an Azure Monitor workspace architecture.

Criteria Description
Segregate by logical boundaries Create separate Azure Monitor workspaces for operational data based on logical boundaries, such as by a role, application type, type of metric etc.
Azure tenants For multiple Azure tenants, create an Azure Monitor workspace in each tenant. Data sources can only send monitoring data to an Azure Monitor workspace in the same Azure tenant.
Azure regions Each Azure Monitor workspace resides in a particular Azure region. Regulatory or compliance requirements might dictate the storage of data in particular locations.
Data ownership Create separate Azure Monitor workspaces to define data ownership, such as by subsidiaries or affiliated companies.

Considerations when creating an Azure Monitor workspace

  • Azure Monitor workspaces are regional. When you create a new Azure Monitor workspace, you provide a region which sets the location in which the data is stored.

  • Start with a single workspace to reduce the complexity of managing and querying data from multiple Azure resources.

  • The default Azure Monitor workspace limit is 1 million active times series and 1 million events per minute ingested.

  • There's no reduction in performance due to the amount of data in your Azure Monitor workspace. Multiple services can send data to the same account simultaneously. There is, however, a limit on how much an Azure Monitor workspace can scale, as explained below.

Growing account capacity

Azure Monitor workspaces have default quotas and limitations for metrics. As your product grows and you need more metrics, you can request an increase to 50 million events or active time series. If your capacity needs to be exceptionally large and your data ingestion needs can no longer be met by a single Azure Monitor workspace, consider creating multiple Azure Monitor workspaces.

Multiple Azure Monitor workspaces

When an Azure Monitor workspace reaches 80% of its maximum capacity or is forecasted to reach that volume of metrics, it's recommended to split the Azure Monitor workspace into multiple workspaces. You should split the workspace based on how the data in the workspace is used by your applications and business processes and by how you want to access that data in the future.

In certain circumstances, splitting an Azure Monitor workspace into multiple workspaces can be necessary. For example:

  • Monitoring data in sovereign clouds: Create an Azure Monitor workspace in each sovereign cloud.
  • Compliance or regulatory requirements that mandate storage of data in specific regions: Create an Azure Monitor workspace per region as per requirements. There might be a need to manage the scale of metrics for large services or financial institutions with regional accounts.
  • Separating metrics in test, pre-production, and production environments: Create an Azure Monitor workspace per environment.

Note

A single query cannot access multiple Azure Monitor workspaces. Keep data that you want to retrieve in a single query in same workspace. For visualization purposes, setting up Grafana with each workspace as a dedicated data source will allow for querying multiple workspaces in a single Grafana panel.

Limitations

See Azure Monitor service limits for performance related service limits for Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus.

Data considerations

Data stored in the Azure Monitor Workspace is handled in accordance with all standards described in the Azure Trust Center. Several considerations exist specific to data stored in the Azure Monitor Workspace:

  • Data is physically stored in the same region that the Azure Monitor Workspace is provisioned in
  • Data is encrypted at rest using a Microsoft-managed key
  • Data is retained for 18 months
  • For details about the Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus' support of PII/EUII data, please see details here

Frequently asked questions

This section provides answers to common questions.

What's the difference between an Azure Monitor workspace and a Log Analytics workspace?

An Azure Monitor workspace is a unique environment for data collected by Azure Monitor. Each workspace has its own data repository, configuration, and permissions. Azure Monitor workspaces will eventually contain all metrics collected by Azure Monitor, including native metrics. Currently, the only data hosted by an Azure Monitor workspace is Prometheus metrics.

You cannot use quota limits, similar to the Log Anlytics Workspace (Daily Cap or Data retention) in the Azure Monitor workspace.

Can I delete Prometheus metrics from an Azure Monitor workspace?

Data is removed from the Azure Monitor workspace according to its data retention period, which is 18 months.

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