Connect to Azure account

In this milestone, you’ll establish the connection between your Azure account and Grafana Cloud using the service principal you created in the previous milestone. This connection enables Grafana Cloud to securely access your Azure metrics and begin monitoring your resources.

Navigate to the Add new credential page in Grafana Cloud if you’re not already there.

1. Enter your Azure service principal credentials on the Add new credential page.

2. In the Name field, enter a descriptive name for your credential, for example production-azure-monitoring.

3. In the Client id field, paste the appId value from the service principal output.

4. In the Client secret field, paste the password value from the service principal output.

5. In the Tenant id field, paste the tenant value from the service principal output.

6. Your Azure service principal credentials are entered on the form.

(Optional) Add Azure-formatted tags to organize and filter your metrics.

By default, resource information including tags is available on the target_info metric. When you add a tag here, you can add tags to your Azure Monitor metrics or filter the Azure Monitor metrics collected by tags. These tags must match the tags configured on your Azure resources.

Skip the following section if you don’t need to filter metrics by Azure tags.

1. In the Tags section, enter an Azure tag, for example Environment:Production.

2. Click Add in the Tags section to save the tag.

(Optional) Add static labels for easier filtering and grouping in Grafana Cloud.

Static labels are key-value pairs applied to all metrics exported by this credential. Use them to distinguish metrics from different environments or teams—for example, add a key of environment and a value of production.

Static labels apply to every metric from this credential. To apply different labels to different Azure resources, create separate credentials.

Skip the following section if you don’t need static labels on your metrics.

1. In the Static labels section, enter a label key, for example environment.

2. Enter a label value, for example production.

3. Click Add in the Static labels section to save the label.

The connection information is entered and ready to be used for metric collection.

In your next milestone, you’ll configure which metrics to collect from your Azure environment.