Microsoft has launched the preview of Azure Managed Grafana, a new managed service that lets customers run the popular open-source analytics visualization tool natively within the Azure cloud platform.
According to Microsoft, organizations can use Grafana to bring together logs, traces, metrics and other disparate data from across an organization and visualize all its telemetry data in a single user interface, including across on-premises, Azure and multi-cloud environments.
With the new offering, the experience is optimized for Azure-native data stores such as Azure Monitor and Data Explorer, making it easier for customers to connect any resources in their subscription and view all resulting telemetry in a familiar Grafana dashboard, Microsoft says.
Microsoft says customers can preserve existing charges in the Azure portal used for monitoring and via a service-to-service integration, can bring any chart into the Azure portal over to their Azure Managed Grafana instance with a one-click to pin function to automate the migration process.
The tool offers dashboards for various Azure Monitor features to help customers build new visualizations. Some features with built-in dashboards include Azure Monitor applications insights, Azure Monitor container insights, Azure Monitor virtual machines insights and Azure Monitor alerts.
Customers can also customize user permissions with specific roles and assignments stored in Azure Active Directory (AD), with definitions mapped transparently to Grafana’s internal roles, enforcing the actual access control.
“This integration enables both simplicity and consistency by allowing customers to manage users in their teams and authorize their use of a Grafana instance centrally through Azure Active Directory,” Microsoft says in an Azure blog.
Azure Managed Grafana can also be configured to access Azure Monitor through a managed identity set up as part of the Grafana instance creation, eliminating the need to deal with another credential separately.
Microsoft also announced new Grafana integrations with Azure Monitor, including the ability to pin Azure Monitor visualizations from Azure Portal to Grafana dashboards and new out-of-the-box Azure Monitor dashboards.
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