Azure Managed Grafana Now in Preview

The Grafana visualization platform and tool is now available in preview as a managed service in Azure. Microsoft announced a partnership with Grafana Labs to bring a managed version into Azure allowing organizations to provision Grafana in minutes while offering deeper integration into Azure native services like Azure Monitor and Azure Data Explorer. In addition, the Azure Managed Grafana platform includes Azure Active Directory support to protect and secure the data visualizations using the Azure native capabilities.   Details on these announcements can be found here

Why This Matters

• Grafana is a popular open-source visualization platform often used for time series and real-time dashboards. The platform includes wide adoption by many leading companies and especially those working with platforms like Sensu, SIEMs, Splunk, and Elasticsearch. By providing an Azure managed service, the Grafana platform will allow organizations to provision Grafana in minutes while significantly reducing the management of the platform.
• Microsoft continues to focus on how to embrace the open-source community and bring the best tools and experiences into more Azure native experiences to reduce barriers to Azure adoption and to make Azure a more attractive choice for these organizations. 
• While organizations can provision and manage their own Grafana instances in Azure, the managed version includes deeper connections to Azure Monitoring and Azure Data Explorer which may make it a more attractive solution than running Grafana in virtual machines.