Azure Kubernetes Service
Observability
Summary
In this lesson, we compared two leading monitoring solutions for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS):
- Azure Container Insights – an integrated, managed service in Azure Monitor
- Prometheus + Grafana – an open-source monitoring stack for full control
Choosing the right approach comes down to your priorities: ease of setup, customization depth, maintenance overhead, and cost.
1. Azure Container Insights
Azure Container Insights delivers end-to-end visibility into your AKS clusters with minimal configuration. Key capabilities include:
- Automatic collection of CPU, memory, and network metrics
- Container-level logs and performance telemetry
- Built-in queries and visualizations in Azure Monitor
- Seamless integration with Azure Alerts and Workbooks
Note
Container Insights is fully managed by Azure Monitor. You incur data ingestion and retention charges, but you avoid operating your own monitoring infrastructure.
Learn more: Container Insights overview
2. Prometheus + Grafana
The Prometheus + Grafana stack is a popular open-source alternative that emphasizes flexibility:
Prometheus
• Scrapes time-series metrics from AKS, nodes, and custom exporters
• Built-in Alertmanager for defining alert rules and notificationsGrafana
• Connects to Prometheus (and other datasources)
• Provides interactive dashboards with rich visualizations
• Supports annotations, templating, and provisioning
Warning
Running Prometheus and Grafana requires provisioning, scaling, and maintaining storage for long-term metrics. Ensure you plan for high-availability and backup.
Explore more:
3. Feature Comparison
| Feature | Container Insights | Prometheus + Grafana |
|---|---|---|
| Setup Complexity | Low (Azure-managed) | Medium to high (self-managed) |
| Customization | Azure Monitor queries & Workbooks | Full Grafana dashboard and alerting customization |
| Maintenance | Managed by Azure | You manage upgrades, scaling, and storage |
| Data Retention | Default 30 days (configurable in Azure Monitor) | Configurable via remote write or object storage |
| Alerting | Azure Alerts integration | Prometheus Alertmanager and Grafana Alerting |
| Cost Model | Pay for data ingestion & retention | Infrastructure + storage costs (or Grafana Cloud) |
4. Next Steps
In the next module, we will survey all Azure platforms capable of hosting container workloads, including:
- Azure Container Instances
- Azure App Service for Containers
- Azure Red Hat OpenShift
Stay tuned!
Links and References
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