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Section 2 · Cloud metrics

Collect Azure metrics using Grafana Alloy for flexibility.

Estimated time: 1 min

Azure metrics: Grafana Alloy

Azure metrics Alloy architecture: Alloy pulls from Azure Monitor across subscriptions, pushes to Grafana Cloud Metrics

Complexity: Flexible | Infrastructure: Linux, Windows, or MacOS VM | Latency: Configurable

The serverless method filters by resource tag and can add static labels, but it can’t rewrite labels the way Alloy’s relabel rules can. When you need that, use Grafana Alloy, Grafana’s open source telemetry collector. Deploy Alloy once, as a Linux VM or a single-replica Kubernetes workload (for example on AKS), not a DaemonSet. It collects metrics from across all your subscriptions. Alloy can authenticate with an Azure managed identity, so there are no service principal credentials to rotate. Its processing pipeline lets you filter and relabel metrics before they’re stored.

Considerations

  • Multiple subscriptions from one Alloy deployment
  • Managed identity support, so no keys to rotate
  • Processing pipeline for filtering and relabeling
  • Alloy infrastructure to deploy, maintain, and update
  • Learning curve

When to use

  • Want managed identity
  • Need relabel rules before metrics are stored

Documentation

View the Azure Alloy metrics documentation.