Microsoft deploys Azure Managed Grafana in preview

Back in November, Microsoft teamed up with Grafana Labs for a new Azure first party service. Microsoft announced the fruits of the partnership with Azure Managed Grafana now available in preview, with familiar Grafana dashboards integrated with Azure services and security.

Grafana is a widely used open source analytics visualization tool that allows users to combine metrics, logs, and traces to visualize telemetry data. Grafana has an extensible architecture. Users can correlate multiple data sources across on-prem and cloud. The new offering provides an experience optimized for Monitor and Data Explorer. Microsoft program managers Arti Gulwadi and Ye Gu wrote:

Customers can preserve existing charts in the Azure portal that are used for monitoring. Through service-to-service integration, our customers can bring any chart in the Azure portal over to their Azure Managed Grafana instance with a one-click “pin to” operation thus automating the entire migration process. Azure Managed Grafana also provides a rich set of built-in dashboards for various Azure Monitor features to help customers easily build new visualizations. For example, some features with built-in dashboards include Azure Monitor application insights, Azure Monitor container insights, Azure Monitor virtual machines insights, and Azure Monitor alerts.

In Managed Grafana, customers are able to customize user permissions with roles and assignments hosted in Azure Active Directory. These permissions are mapped to Grafana internal roles to enforce access control. Additionally, users can configure the backend to access Monitor with managed identity  without creating a separate credential.