Ingest Azure Monitor Metrics

groundcover supports ingesting Azure Monitor metrics directly into our platform, allowing you to visualize them using dashboards and create alerts.

Things to know

Tenancy restrictions

The method below is relevant only for subscriptions in the same tenant as the managed BYOC set up by groundcover.

Ingestion interval

The integration pulls data from Azure Monitor according to this interval. The lower the interval, the higher the polling rate and as a result, the overall costs will be higher. The interval can be altered in the Advanced Settings in the configuration wizard.

Data storage

Data fetched is stored in the Victoria Metrics database, meaning metrics are queried via the Azure Monitor API only one time per data point.

Supported services

groundcover can support the ingestion of every Azure service listed in the Azure docs.

Setting up the integration

The integration setup is done directly through the App by following these steps:

1. Navigate to Settings > Integrations > Data Sources or following this link. Note that only users with Admin permissions can navigate to this page.

2. Select Microsoft Azure and follow the 3 steps in the wizard. Note that in order for the integration to work, a role assignment should be created, granting groundcover with permissions to poll metrics. To create a role assignment, please follow the guidelines in the next section.

Create a Role Assignment

The following steps requires the details of a dedicated managed identity to set up the integration.

Make sure it has been provided to you by the groundcover team

1. Go to the subscription where you want to collect metrics from.

2. Navigate to Access Control (IAM).

3. Add a new role assignment

   • Click on Add -> Add role assignment.

   • Search and select the Monitoring Reader role.

   • Click Next.

   • In Assign access to choose Managed identity.

   • Click Select members.

   • From the groundcover subscription, in Managed Identity choose User assigned managed identity and select the integrations identity by the integrations identity provided by groundcover.

   • Select Review + Assign

Breaking a metric down by dimension

Some Azure Monitor metrics only return a meaningful value when broken down by a dimension — for example, a Storage Account's transaction metrics broken down by BlobType. In the wizard's Metrics selection step, add the dimension name(s) you want under Dimensions. groundcover requests the metric with a single filter combining every configured dimension (<dimension1> eq '*' and <dimension2> eq '*'...), not one request per dimension.

The underlying Azure Monitor query has no paging and is capped at a very high result limit. If a metric/dimension combination returns more data points than that cap, the excess is silently dropped with no indication in the response that truncation happened.

To find which dimensions a metric supports, check the metric's page in the Azure metrics reference or query the Metric Definitions API — both list supported dimension names. To see the actual dimension values present in your data, query the Metrics API itself with resultType=metadata.