Azure Monitor metrics in Osuite

Overview

Osuite ingests Azure Monitor metrics through the OpenTelemetry Collector. The azure_monitor receiver scrapes the Azure Monitor API on an interval, converts each metric to OTLP, and forwards it through the otlp/osuite exporter, where it correlates with the rest of your telemetry.

The receiver runs anywhere the Collector runs and pulls metrics for one or more subscriptions. By default it scrapes every service and every metric in each configured subscription; narrow that with resource_groups, services, and metrics filters.

Caution

The azure_monitor receiver is alpha in opentelemetry-collector-contrib and ships only in the Contrib distribution (otelcol-contrib), not the core Collector. Configuration keys may change between releases. Pin the Collector version you deploy.

Prerequisites

• An OpenTelemetry Collector from the Contrib distribution (otelcol-contrib) that includes the azure_monitor receiver.
• Your Osuite ingest endpoint and token.
• An Azure AD app registration (service principal) for the Collector to authenticate as:
  1. In Azure AD, register an application and record its Directory (tenant) ID and Application (client) ID.
  2. Create a client secret for the application and record its value.
  3. Assign the app the Monitoring Reader role on each subscription you want to scrape (Subscription → Access control (IAM) → Add role assignment).
• The client secret provided to the Collector as the AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET environment variable so it stays out of the config file.

Note

When the Collector runs on an Azure resource, you can use a managed identity instead of a client secret: set credentials: managed_identity and omit client_secret (optionally set client_id for a user-assigned identity). The managed identity still needs the Monitoring Reader role.

Collector config

This configuration scrapes one subscription with service principal credentials and forwards metrics to Osuite. Replace the subscription, tenant, and client identifiers.

receivers:
  azure_monitor:
    subscription_ids:
      - <your-subscription-id>
    tenant_id: <your-tenant-id>
    client_id: <your-client-id>
    client_secret: ${env:AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET}
    collection_interval: 60s

processors:
  batch:

exporters:
  otlp/osuite:
    endpoint: ingest.<region>.osuite.io:443
    tls:
      insecure: false
    headers:
      x-osuite-ingest-token: <your-ingest-token>

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers: [azure_monitor]
      processors: [batch]
      exporters: [otlp/osuite]

To limit scraping to specific services and metrics, add resource_groups, services, and metrics filters:

  azure_monitor:
    subscription_ids:
      - <your-subscription-id>
    tenant_id: <your-tenant-id>
    client_id: <your-client-id>
    client_secret: ${env:AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET}
    collection_interval: 60s
    services:
      - Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines
      - Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts
    metrics:
      "microsoft.compute/virtualmachines":
        "Percentage CPU": [Average]

Caution

Once you list metrics for a namespace under metrics, only those metrics are scraped for it — any metric you omit for that namespace is dropped. Use [*] or [] as the value to fetch all aggregations for a metric.

Validate

Start the Collector and confirm it logs no authentication (401/403) or throttling errors against the Azure Monitor API. Then check Osuite.

Verify in Osuite

What you should see

Azure Monitor metrics appear in Dashboards → Explore metrics within a few minutes, named after their Azure metric (for example Percentage CPU under Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines), with the resource ID and resource group attached as attributes.

Data collected

Metrics keep their Azure metric name and are tagged with the resource type namespace, resource ID, and resource group; enabling append_tags_as_attributes adds selected Azure resource tags as attributes. Metric dimensions are split out unless you disable dimensions.enabled.

Common namespaces:

Namespace	Covers
Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines	VM CPU, disk, network
Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts	Transactions, capacity, latency, availability
Microsoft.Sql/servers/databases	DTU/vCore usage, connections, deadlocks
Microsoft.Web/sites	App Service requests, response time, HTTP 5xx
Microsoft.Network/loadBalancers	Data path availability, byte and packet counts
Microsoft.ContainerService/managedClusters	AKS node and pod resource metrics

Troubleshooting

An empty result set almost always means the service principal lacks the Monitoring Reader role on the subscription, or the wrong tenant/client identifiers are set. Confirm the role assignment, confirm AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET is exported to the Collector process, and remember that a metrics block silently drops any metric you did not list for that namespace. If you scrape many resources and hit rate limits, set use_batch_api: true.

No data in Osuite after a few minutes? Work through these checks.

• Endpoint — confirm the exporter targets exactly ingest.<region>.osuite.io:443 for your region, over TLS.
• Token — confirm the ingest header carries a valid <your-ingest-token> and has not been rotated.
• Pipeline — confirm the signal you expect (traces, logs, or metrics) is wired into an active pipeline with the otlp/osuite exporter attached.
• Export errors — check the application or Collector logs for OTLP export failures (auth, DNS, TLS, connection refused).
• Network — confirm the host has outbound access to the ingest endpoint on port 443.
• Timing — allow up to a minute for the first data to appear before assuming a failure.

Still stuck? Ask the Investigation Agent or contact support.

Next steps

• Dashboards — build views over your Azure Monitor metrics.
• Alerts — alert on Azure thresholds with PromQL.