What is Azure Managed Grafana?
Azure Managed Grafana is a fully managed edition of Grafana Labs’ Grafana, operated and supported by Microsoft. The service brings metrics, logs, and traces together in a single interface and is optimized for the Azure environment, including native support for Azure Monitor and Azure Data Explorer.
Unlike self-hosted Grafana, Microsoft handles the entire lifecycle: provisioning, updates, patches, and high availability. Sign-in and access control use Microsoft Entra ID identities.
Core Features
- Fully managed Grafana instance without infrastructure management
- Native integration with Azure Monitor and Azure Data Explorer, plus direct import of existing portal charts
- Microsoft Entra ID for authentication and access control
- Standard tier with zone redundancy, private endpoints, alerting, and optional Grafana Enterprise
- Instance sizes X1 (default) and X2 (more memory, higher alert rule limits)
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, other clouds, and on-premises systems in a single Grafana instance.
Benefits
- No dedicated Grafana administration required
- Enterprise-grade features such as centralized identity management and role-based access control
- Scaling through the managed Azure infrastructure
- Direct integration with Azure data sources without additional configuration
Frequently Asked Questions
Which data sources are supported?
The Standard tier provides all core plugins, including Azure Monitor, Azure Data Explorer, Prometheus, GitHub, and JSON API data sources, along with many other standard Grafana data sources.
Can I migrate existing dashboards?
Yes, Grafana dashboards can be exported as JSON and imported into Azure Managed Grafana. Existing charts can also be imported directly from the Azure portal.
Which tiers exist today?
The Essential tier can no longer be selected for new workspaces and is being phased out; existing Essential workspaces continue running until full deprecation. New workspaces use the Standard tier, which is the only tier offering an SLA along with features like zone redundancy, private endpoints, and alerting.
Can I use Grafana plugins and Grafana Enterprise?
The Standard tier includes the core plugins, and Grafana Enterprise can be enabled optionally at additional licensing cost. Not every community plugin is approved for 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, tier selection, and migration from existing Essential workspaces.
Contact us for a non-binding consultation on Azure Managed Grafana.
Note: All product information on this page has been compiled with care, but is provided without guarantee and may be outdated or incomplete. Cloud services evolve rapidly — features, pricing, SLAs, and availability change frequently. Authoritative and up-to-date information can only be found on the official product page of Azure (official documentation). This page does not represent an offer by Azure.
