Fine-Tune Observability Configurations for All Your Azure Integrations in One Place | Datadog

Fine-tune observability configurations for all your Azure integrations in one place

Author Michael Cronk
Author Shane Dudfield
Author Grant Palmer

Published: March 26, 2024

Microsoft Azure provides an array of managed services to support many aspects of cloud computing, including application development, workload migration, and data management. To help you monitor the health and performance of these services, Datadog offers integrations with more than 40 Azure services, including Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Cosmos DB, and Azure App Services. Each integration provides robust data visualizations, meaningful alerts, and one-click Datadog Agent deployment. For organizations with large collections of integrations, however, it can be challenging to assess and adjust your overall Azure monitoring strategy without needing to jump back and forth between multiple configuration environments.

Our updated Azure integration configuration page brings together critical details about all of your Azure integrations in one place, enabling you to quickly spot gaps in your monitoring coverage and investigate problems that could be preventing telemetry data from being ingested properly. You can adjust configuration details for each of your app registrations, including the metrics being collected and resources being monitored, as well as associated subscriptions. Additionally, the configuration page lists all your integrations sorted by their monitoring status, so you can quickly determine which Azure services are being monitored by Datadog and which aren’t.

In this post, we’ll explore how the Azure configuration page helps you:

Review and update configurations for all your app registrations in one view

The updated Azure configuration page helps you drill down into your monitoring setup—particularly your app registrations and subscriptions—within a unified view. Datadog ingests data from your Azure subscriptions via the Azure native integration or through app registrations linked to these subscriptions. The tabs on the configuration page give you critical information about each of these components: the app registrations via the Configuration tab, the subscriptions via the Monitored Subscriptions tab, and the integrations themselves via the Integrations tab.

The Configuration tab for an app registration, showing various IDs for the registration.

On the Configuration tab, you can see a list of your app registrations organized by their unique client IDs. For each app registration, you can customize telemetry data collection by adding tags for resources such as hosts, app service plans, and container apps—this enables you to filter the metrics sent to Datadog and minimize unnecessary noise. You can also enable resource monitoring for Azure Active Directory resources, which is required for Datadog features such as Resource Catalog and Cloud Security Management. Additionally, the Configuration tab lists any ongoing issues with your app registrations that require attention, such as authorization failures, and provides you with direct pathways to quickly bring this information up to date. For example, if you notice an expired client secret for one of the app registrations, you can use the link provided to jump straight to the Azure portal and create a new secret.

An 'invalid credentials' error message for an app registration.

On the Monitored Subscriptions tab, you can see an overview of all the subscriptions associated with your app registrations. Because many teams use subscriptions to manage tasks such as assigning user permissions and organizing billing agreements, determining which ones are active at any given time is crucial for both security monitoring and cloud cost management. As with the Configuration tab, the Monitored Subscriptions tab lists any ongoing issues with your subscriptions. You can also search for subscriptions by name or ID, as well as jump to related app registrations.

A list of subscriptions associated with an Azure account.

Being able to view the configuration details for your Azure integration ecosystem in one place means you can spot places where your current monitoring configuration may contain errors or outdated information, and then update these details directly from within Datadog. Let’s say you notice some subscriptions on the Monitored Subscriptions tab are for services that are no longer in use. You can navigate to the Connected App Registration column to remove the app registration currently monitoring these subscriptions. Additionally, let’s say you’d like to onboard a new group of subscriptions with dedicated integration settings. You can use the Add New App Registration button on this tab to easily connect them via a new app registration.

Investigate data collection issues within your Azure integrations

While the Configuration and Monitored Subscriptions tabs help you manage your Azure data collection, you can use the Azure Integrations tab to review the features and statuses of the integrations themselves. Here, you can see a list of all the Azure integrations available to your organization and their supported metrics. The integrations are categorized by their status, giving you a high-level overview of which services within your infrastructure are being monitored by Datadog. This list includes both native Datadog integrations as well as Datadog Marketplace integrations.

A list of Azure integrations being monitored by Datadog.

To explore an integration in more depth, you can select its tile. On this tile, you’re able to access information about what features this integration provides, as well as details about configuration and ingested metrics. By helping you determine what data is being collected from each integration, these tiles enable you to quickly assess monitoring coverage for your Azure ecosystem as well as find inspiration for how you can further customize dashboards and monitors.

Fill gaps in your Azure monitoring with Datadog

With so many features available, ensuring complete, up-to-date monitoring coverage for your Azure ecosystem can be a challenge. The updated Azure configuration page streamlines this process, enabling you to quickly view and update key configuration for all of your subscriptions. Additionally, this page can help you assess whether or not data is being properly captured by your integrations, enabling you to quickly troubleshoot observability issues.

To get started with the configuration page, you can view our documentation. Or, if you’re new to Datadog, you can sign up for a 14-day today.