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Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus (preview)

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Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus is a component of Azure Monitor Metrics, providing additional flexibility in the types of metric data that you can collect and analyze with Azure Monitor. Prometheus metrics share some features with platform and custom metrics, but use some different features to better support open source tools such as PromQL and Grafana.

Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus allows you to collect and analyze metrics at scale using a Prometheus-compatible monitoring solution, based on the Prometheus project from the Cloud Native Compute Foundation. This fully managed service allows you to use the Prometheus query language (PromQL) to analyze and alert on the performance of monitored infrastructure and workloads without having to operate the underlying infrastructure.

Important

Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus is intended for storing information about service health of customer machines and applications. It is not intended for storing any data classified as Personal Identifiable Information (PII) or End User Identifiable Information (EUII). We strongly recommend that you do not send any sensitive information (usernames, credit card numbers etc.) into Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus fields like metric names, label names, or label values.

Data sources

Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus can currently collect data from any of the following data sources.

  • Azure Kubernetes service (AKS)
  • Any Kubernetes cluster running self-managed Prometheus using remote-write.

Enable

The only requirement to enable Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus is to create an Azure Monitor workspace, which is where Prometheus metrics are stored. Once this workspace is created, you can onboard services that collect Prometheus metrics.

Grafana integration

The primary method for visualizing Prometheus metrics is Azure Managed Grafana. Connect your Azure Monitor workspace to a Grafana workspace so that it can be used as a data source in a Grafana dashboard. You then have access to multiple prebuilt dashboards that use Prometheus metrics and the ability to create any number of custom dashboards.

Rules and alerts

Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus supports recording rules and alert rules using PromQL queries. Metrics recorded by recording rules are stored back in the Azure Monitor workspace and can be queried by dashboard or by other rules. Alert rules and recording rules can be created and managed using Azure Managed Prometheus rule groups. For your AKS cluster, a set of predefined Prometheus alert rules and recording rules is provided to allow easy quick start.

Alerts fired by alert rules can trigger actions or notifications, as defined in the action groups configured for the alert rule. You can also view fired and resolved Prometheus alerts in the Azure portal along with other alert types.

Limitations

See Azure Monitor service limits for performance related service limits for Azure Monitor workspaces.

  • Azure monitor managed service for Prometheus is only supported in public clouds.
  • Private Links aren't supported for data collection into Azure monitor workspace.
  • Metrics addon doesn't work on AKS clusters configured with HTTP proxy.
  • Scraping and storing metrics at frequencies less than 1 second isn't supported.

Prometheus references

Following are links to Prometheus documentation.

Next steps