Explore your Azure service data
In this milestone, you’ll navigate and analyze the Azure metrics collected by Cloud Provider Observability. Preconfigured dashboards appear automatically after you configure metrics, and you installed the preconfigured alerts in the previous milestone.
Cloud Provider Observability provides preconfigured dashboards for the Azure services you’re monitoring. Each dashboard visualizes metrics for a specific service type, such as performance, usage, and availability.
Use the Services tab to open a service dashboard and explore your Azure metrics.
Click the Services tab.
Use the Service or Source filters to find the service you want to view, then click its name in the Service column. Select Services with firing alerts to show only services that have alerts firing.
For example, select Azure Virtual Machines to view Virtual Machine metrics. If a service name isn’t a link, there’s no preconfigured dashboard for that service.
If there are multiple instances of the service, select the specific instance you want to view.
For example, you can select a specific instance of an Azure Virtual Machine.
Use dashboard controls to customize your view:
- Select a time range using the time picker in the upper right. For example, select Last 24 hours to view recent performance.
- Apply variable filters to focus on specific instances, resource groups, or subscriptions. For example, select a specific resource group from the Resource Group dropdown.
Use panel controls to investigate and analyze metrics:
- To open the links for a service’s custom dashboards, Metrics Drilldown, or Explore, click Explore for that service on the Services tab.
- To see ML predictions for certain panels, click Predict. For more information on this feature and how to enable it, refer to View predictions in the Cloud Provider Observability Azure documentation.
You opened a service dashboard and can customize time range, filters, and panel controls to analyze Azure metrics.
Dashboards provide the following operational insights:
- Resource utilization patterns: Identify peak usage times and plan capacity accordingly across Virtual Machines, databases, and storage
- Performance bottlenecks: Spot consistently high CPU, memory, storage, or network utilization that may require optimization
- Cost optimization opportunities: Find underutilized resources that could be downsized or terminated to reduce Azure spending
- Availability monitoring: Track resource health and service uptime across your Azure environment
- Service dependencies: Understand relationships between Azure resources and identify potential cascading failure points
These insights help you prioritize capacity, cost, and reliability improvements across your Azure environment.
When at least one alert is Firing and Grafana Assistant is enabled on your stack, Analyze with Assistant and the row Analyze icon appear on the Alerts tab. If all alerts show Normal, these Assistant controls aren’t displayed.
Click the Alerts tab to review preconfigured alerts for your Azure services.
Use the State, Health, Severity, and Service filters to narrow results as you review the alerts list.
To see a recommendation for alert resolution, click the tooltip in the Summary column.
In the Alert column, click an alert name to view the dashboard for that service.
You reviewed alert state and can open service dashboards from the Alerts tab.
For more information about available dashboards and alerts, refer to Preconfigured dashboards and alerts for Azure metrics. To learn more about Grafana Assistant in Cloud Provider Observability, refer to Analyze alerts and build dashboards with Grafana Assistant.
In your final milestone, you’ll celebrate completing this Azure monitoring learning path and discover additional resources for expanding your observability capabilities.