Documentation Grafana Cloud Connect to data sources Data sources Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor data source

Grafana ships with built-in support for Azure Monitor, the Azure service to maximize the availability and performance of applications and services in the Azure Cloud. This topic explains configuring and querying specific to the Azure Monitor data source.

For instructions on how to add a data source to Grafana, refer to the administration documentation. Only users with the organization administrator role can add data sources.

Once you’ve added the Azure Monitor data source, you can configure it so that your Grafana instance’s users can create queries in its query editor when they build dashboards and use Explore.

The Azure Monitor data source supports visualizing data from four Azure services:

• Azure Monitor Metrics: Collect numeric data from resources in your Azure account.
• Azure Monitor Logs: Collect log and performance data from your Azure account, and query using the Kusto Query Language (KQL).
• Azure Resource Graph: Query your Azure resources across subscriptions.
• Azure Monitor Application Insights: Collect trace logging data and other application performance metrics.

Configure the data source

To access the data source configuration page:

1. Click Connections in the left-side menu.

2. Under Your connections, click Data sources.

3. Enter Azure Monitor in the search bar.

4. Click Azure Monitor.

   The Settings tab of the data source is displayed.

Configure Azure Active Directory (AD) authentication

You must create an app registration and service principal in Azure AD to authenticate the data source. For configuration details, refer to the Azure documentation for service principals.

The app registration you create must have the Reader role assigned on the subscription. For more information, refer to Azure documentation for role assignments.

If you host Grafana in Azure, such as in App Service or Azure Virtual Machines, you can configure the Azure Monitor data source to use Managed Identity for secure authentication without entering credentials into Grafana. For details, refer to Configuring using Managed Identity.

You can configure the Azure Monitor data source to use Workload Identity for secure authentication without entering credentials into Grafana if you host Grafana in a Kubernetes environment, such as AKS, and require access to Azure resources. For details, refer to Configuring using Workload Identity.

Provision the data source

You can define and configure the data source in YAML files as part of Grafana’s provisioning system. For more information about provisioning, and for available configuration options, refer to Provisioning Grafana.

Provisioning examples

Azure AD App Registration (client secret):

yaml Copy

apiVersion: 1 # config file version

datasources:
  - name: Azure Monitor
    type: grafana-azure-monitor-datasource
    access: proxy
    jsonData:
      azureAuthType: clientsecret
      cloudName: azuremonitor # See table below
      tenantId: <tenant-id>
      clientId: <client-id>
      subscriptionId: <subscription-id> # Optional, default subscription
    secureJsonData:
      clientSecret: <client-secret>
    version: 1

Managed Identity:

yaml Copy

apiVersion: 1 # config file version

datasources:
  - name: Azure Monitor
    type: grafana-azure-monitor-datasource
    access: proxy
    jsonData:
      azureAuthType: msi
      subscriptionId: <subscription-id> # Optional, default subscription
    version: 1

Workload Identity:

yaml Copy

apiVersion: 1 # config file version

datasources:
  - name: Azure Monitor
    type: grafana-azure-monitor-datasource
    access: proxy
    jsonData:
      azureAuthType: workloadidentity
      subscriptionId: <subscription-id> # Optional, default subscription
    version: 1

Current User:

yaml Copy

apiVersion: 1 # config file version

datasources:
  - name: Azure Monitor
    type: grafana-azure-monitor-datasource
    access: proxy
    jsonData:
      azureAuthType: currentuser
      oauthPassThru: true
      disableGrafanaCache: true
      subscriptionId: <subscription-id> # Optional, default subscription
    version: 1

Supported cloud names

Configure Managed Identity

You can use managed identity to configure Azure Monitor in Grafana if you host Grafana in Azure (such as an App Service or with Azure Virtual Machines) and have managed identity enabled on your VM. This lets you securely authenticate data sources without manually configuring credentials via Azure AD App Registrations. For details on Azure managed identities, refer to the Azure documentation.

To enable managed identity for Grafana:

1. Set the managed_identity_enabled flag in the [azure] section of the Grafana server configuration.

   ini Copy

   [azure]
   managed_identity_enabled = true

2. In the Azure Monitor data source configuration, set Authentication to Managed Identity.

   This hides the directory ID, application ID, and client secret fields, and the data source uses managed identity to authenticate to Azure Monitor Metrics and Logs, and Azure Resource Graph.

3. You can set the managed_identity_client_id field in the [azure] section of the Grafana server configuration to allow a user-assigned managed identity to be used instead of the default system-assigned identity.

ini Copy

[azure]
managed_identity_enabled = true
managed_identity_client_id = USER_ASSIGNED_IDENTITY_CLIENT_ID

Configure Workload Identity

You can use workload identity to configure Azure Monitor in Grafana if you host Grafana in a Kubernetes environment, such as AKS, in conjunction with managed identities. This lets you securely authenticate data sources without manually configuring credentials via Azure AD App Registrations. For details on workload identity, refer to the Azure workload identity documentation.

To enable workload identity for Grafana:

1. Set the workload_identity_enabled flag in the [azure] section of the Grafana server configuration.

   ini Copy

   [azure]
   workload_identity_enabled = true

2. In the Azure Monitor data source configuration, set Authentication to Workload Identity.

   This hides the directory ID, application ID, and client secret fields, and the data source uses workload identity to authenticate to Azure Monitor Metrics and Logs, and Azure Resource Graph.

3. There are additional configuration variables that can control the authentication method.workload_identity_tenant_id represents the Azure AD tenant that contains the managed identity, workload_identity_client_id represents the client ID of the managed identity if it differs from the default client ID, workload_identity_token_file represents the path to the token file. Refer to the documentation for more information on what values these variables should use, if any.

   ini Copy

   [azure]
   workload_identity_enabled = true
   workload_identity_tenant_id = IDENTITY_TENANT_ID
   workload_identity_client_id = IDENTITY_CLIENT_ID
   workload_identity_token_file = TOKEN_FILE_PATH

Configure Current User authentication

If your Grafana instance is configured with Azure Entra (formerly Active Directory) authentication for login, this authentication method can be used to forward the currently logged in user’s credentials to the data source. The users credentials will then be used when requesting data from the data source. For details on how to configure your Grafana instance using Azure Entra refer to the documentation.

This method of authentication doesn’t inherently support all backend functionality as a user’s credentials won’t be in scope. Affected functionality includes alerting, reporting, and recorded queries. In order to support backend queries when using a data source configured with current user authentication, you can configure service credentials. Also, note that query and resource caching is disabled by default for data sources using current user authentication.

Permissions for fallback credentials may need to be broad to appropriately support backend functionality. For example, an alerting query created by a user is dependent on their permissions. If a user tries to create an alert for a resource that the fallback credentials can’t access, the alert will fail.

To enable current user authentication for Grafana:

1. Set the user_identity_enabled flag in the [azure] section of the Grafana server configuration. By default this will also enable fallback service credentials. If you want to disable service credentials at the instance level set user_identity_fallback_credentials_enabled to false.

   ini Copy

   [azure]
   user_identity_enabled = true

2. In the Azure Monitor data source configuration, set Authentication to Current User. If fallback service credentials are enabled at the instance level, an additional configuration section is visible that you can use to enable or disable using service credentials for this data source.

3. If you want backend functionality to work with this data source, enable service credentials and configure the data source using the most applicable credentials for your circumstances.

Query the data source

The Azure Monitor data source can query data from Azure Monitor Metrics and Logs, the Azure Resource Graph, and Application Insights Traces. Each source has its own specialized query editor.

For details, see the query editor documentation.

Use template variables

Instead of hard-coding details such as server, application, and sensor names in metric queries, you can use variables. Grafana lists these variables in dropdown select boxes at the top of the dashboard to help you change the data displayed in your dashboard. Grafana refers to such variables as template variables.

For details, see the template variables documentation.

Application Insights and Insights Analytics (removed)

Until Grafana v8.0, you could query the same Azure Application Insights data using Application Insights and Insights Analytics.

These queries were deprecated in Grafana v7.5. In Grafana v8.0, Application Insights and Insights Analytics were made read-only in favor of querying this data through Metrics and Logs. These query methods were completely removed in Grafana v9.0.

If you’re upgrading from a Grafana version prior to v9.0 and relied on Application Insights and Analytics queries, refer to the Grafana v9.0 documentation for help migrating these queries to Metrics and Logs queries.