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Azure metrics - Grafana Alloy

How it works

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

Complexity: Flexible | Infrastructure: VM, ACI, or AKS | Latency: Configurable

Trade-offs

ProsCons
Multi-subscription from one agentDeploy and manage Alloy
Managed identity (no key rotation)Infrastructure to maintain
Full processing pipelineLearning curve
Combine with other sources

When to use

  • Multi-subscription environments
  • Want managed identity
  • Combining Azure with other clouds

Documentation

View the full documentation. Learning path coming soon!

Azure Alloy metrics

Script

If scrape jobs aren’t enough, maybe you have multiple Azure subscriptions or you want more control. Grafana Alloy is your answer.

Alloy is an open-source telemetry collector that Grafana maintains. You deploy it once, maybe as a container in ACI or a pod in AKS, and it can collect metrics from across all your subscriptions.

Here’s what makes this powerful: Alloy can use Azure managed identity for authentication. That means no service principal credentials to rotate. It just uses the identity assigned to its compute.

And Alloy has a full processing pipeline. You can filter out metrics you don’t need, relabel things before they’re stored, aggregate high-cardinality data.

The catch is that you’re now running infrastructure. Alloy needs to be deployed, monitored, and updated.

But for enterprises with multiple subscriptions, or teams that want managed identity, or organizations running multi-cloud where they want one collector for everything, Alloy is worth the operational investment.

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