Azure Monitor Integration

The Azure Monitor feature collects and aggregates logs and metrics from a variety of sources into a common data platform where it can be used for analysis, visualization, and alerting.

The Azure Monitor metrics are numerical values that describe some aspect of a system at a particular point in time. They are collected at regular intervals and are identified with a timestamp, a name, a value, and one or more defining labels.

The Azure Resource Metrics will periodically retrieve the Azure Monitor metrics using the Azure REST APIs as MetricList. Additional Azure API calls will be executed to retrieve information regarding the resources targeted by the user.

Before you start, check the Authentication and costs section.

Follow these step-by-step instructions on how to set up an Azure metrics integration.

Period:: (string) Reporting interval. Metrics will have a timegrain of 5 minutes, so the Period configuration option for monitor should have a value of 300s or multiple of 300sfor relevant results.

Resources:: (string) Contains following options:

resource_id:: ([]string) The fully qualified ID's of the resource, including the resource name and resource type. Has the format /subscriptions/{guid}/resourceGroups/{resource-group-name}/providers/{resource-provider-namespace}/{resource-type}/{resource-name}. Should return a list of resources.

You can gather metrics from a large number of resources. To reduce verbosity, you can enter a resource group and filter by resource type, or type in a “resource_query” where you can filter resources inside your subscription. Check the following resources API:

• Resources - List
• Resources - List By Resource Group

resource_group:: ([]string) Using the resource_type configuration option as a filter is required for the resource groups entered. This option should return a list resources we want to apply our metric configuration options on.

resource_type:: (string) As mentioned above this will be a filter option for the resource group api, will check for all resources under the specified group that are the type under this configuration.

resource_query:: (string) Should contain a filter entered by the user, the output will be a list of resources.

metrics:: List of different metrics to collect information.

namespace:: (string) Namespaces are a way to categorize or group similar metrics together. By using namespaces, users can achieve isolation between groups of metrics that might collect different insights or performance indicators.

name:: ([]string) Name of the metrics that's being reported. Usually, the name is descriptive enough to help identify what's measured. A list of metric names can be entered as well.

aggregations:: ([]string) List of supported aggregations. Azure Monitor stores all metrics at one-minute granularity intervals. During a given minute, a metric might need to be sampled several times or it might need to be measured for many discrete events. To limit the number of raw values we have to emit and pay for in Azure Monitor, they will locally pre-aggregate and emit the values: Minimum: The minimum observed value from all the samples and measurements during the minute. Maximum: The maximum observed value from all the samples and measurements during the minute. Sum: The summation of all the observed values from all the samples and measurements during the minute. Count: The number of samples and measurements taken during the minute. Total: The total number of all the observed values from all the samples and measurements during the minute. If no aggregations are filled, the primary aggregation assigned for this metric will be considered.

dimensions:: List of metric dimensions. Dimensions are optional, not all metrics may have dimensions. A custom metric can have up to 10 dimensions. A dimension is a key or value pair that helps describe additional characteristics about the metric being collected. By using the additional characteristics, you can collect more information about the metric, which allows for deeper insights. By using this key, you can filter the metric to see how much memory specific processes use or to identify the top five processes by memory usage. Metrics with dimensions are exported as flattened single dimensional metrics, aggregated across dimension values.

name:: Dimension key value:: Dimension value. (Users can select * to return metric values for each dimension)

ignore_unsupported:: (bool) Namespaces can be unsupported by some resources and supported in some, this configuration option makes sure no error messages are returned if the namespace is unsupported. The same will go for the metrics configured, some can be removed from Azure Monitor and it should not affect the state of the module.

Users can select the options to retrieve all metrics from a specific namespace using the following:

Example configuration:

- resource_query: "resourceType eq 'Microsoft.DocumentDb/databaseAccounts'"
  metrics:
  - name: ["DataUsage", "DocumentCount", "DocumentQuota"]
    namespace: "Microsoft.DocumentDb/databaseAccounts"
    ignore_unsupported: true
    dimensions:
    - name: "DatabaseName"
      value: "*"

This integration includes one or more Kibana dashboards that visualizes the data collected by the integration. The screenshots below illustrate how the ingested data is displayed.