What is Azure Managed Grafana?
Azure Managed Grafana is a fully managed Grafana service that enables creating dashboards and visualizations for monitoring data. The service integrates natively with Azure Monitor, Azure Data Explorer, and other data sources.
Unlike self-hosted Grafana, Azure handles complete lifecycle management: provisioning, updates, patches, and high availability. Teams can focus on creating dashboards without worrying about infrastructure.
Core Features
- Fully managed Grafana instance without infrastructure management
- Native integration with Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Prometheus
- Azure Active Directory authentication and RBAC
- Preconfigured dashboards for Azure services
- Private Link for secure connections
Typical Use Cases
Central Monitoring Dashboard: Teams create unified dashboards combining metrics from Azure Monitor, Prometheus, and other sources.
Application Performance Monitoring: Developers visualize Application Insights data in custom Grafana dashboards.
Multi-Cloud Observability: Organizations aggregate monitoring data from Azure, AWS, and on-premises in a single Grafana instance.
Benefits
- No Grafana administration required
- Enterprise features like SSO and RBAC out-of-the-box
- Scaling through Azure infrastructure
- Direct integration with Azure data sources without additional configuration
Frequently Asked Questions
Which data sources are supported?
Besides Azure Monitor and Azure Data Explorer, all standard Grafana data sources are supported: Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and many more.
Can I migrate existing dashboards?
Yes, Grafana dashboards can be exported as JSON and imported into Azure Managed Grafana.
How do the tiers differ?
Essential provides basic features for small teams. Standard offers higher limits, Availability Zones, and advanced features.
Can I use Grafana plugins?
Yes, installed plugins are available via the Grafana Plugin Catalog. Not all plugins are supported in the managed environment.
Integration with innFactory
As a Microsoft Solutions Partner, innFactory supports you in implementing observability solutions with Azure Managed Grafana. We help with dashboard design, data source integration, and best practices.
Contact us for a non-binding consultation on Azure Managed Grafana.
