Skip to main content
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
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 notifications
  • Grafana
    • Connects to Prometheus (and other datasources)
    • Provides interactive dashboards with rich visualizations
    • Supports annotations, templating, and provisioning
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

​
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!

Watch Video