Slide 5 of 12

Azure metrics scrape jobs

How it works

Azure metrics scrape jobs architecture: Grafana Cloud pulls from Azure Monitor API

Complexity: Simple | Infrastructure: None | Latency: Minutes

Trade-offs

ProsCons
Managed by Grafana CloudMinutes latency
Simple service principal authAPI rate limits at scale
Automatic resource discoveryPer-subscription credentials
Converts to PromQLCross-subscription needs multiple configs

When to use

  • Getting started with Azure metrics
  • Single subscription
  • Minimal infrastructure preference

Learning path

Configure this approach step by step.

Azure metrics scrape jobs

Script

Switching to Azure. Scrape jobs work similarly here.

You create a service principal in Azure AD with read access to Azure Monitor, provide those credentials to Grafana Cloud, and you’re off. Grafana Cloud queries the Azure Monitor API, discovers your resources automatically, and pulls metrics in.

Just like with AWS, the metrics get converted to Prometheus format so you can query with PromQL.

The trade-offs are familiar: minute-level latency because that’s how the API works, and if you have high-cardinality resources like hundreds of App Service instances, you might hit API rate limits.

But for a typical single-subscription environment, scrape jobs get you monitoring quickly with zero Azure infrastructure to deploy. If you’re just starting your Azure observability journey, this is the way to go.

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