Monitoring Azure Container Storage with Managed Prometheus

Azure Container Storage now integrates seamlessly with Managed Prometheus, an advanced open-source monitoring and alerting solution. This powerful integration provides valuable insights into the performance and health of your stateful workloads running on Azure Container Storage, enabling better observability and proactive management.

Key Benefits

• Enhanced Observability: Gain access to key metrics, including storage pool capacity, disk utilization, and I/O performance, to understand workload performance better.
• Improved Troubleshooting: Quickly identify and diagnose performance bottlenecks or issues affecting your workloads to maintain optimal operation.
• Proactive Alerts: Set up alerts to notify you of potential issues before they escalate, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity.

How It Works

Managed Prometheus

Azure Monitor offers a fully managed and scalable Prometheus environment. This simplifies deployment and maintenance, enabling you to focus on monitoring rather than infrastructure management.

Metrics Collection

Azure Container Storage automatically gathers key metrics such as:

• Storage Pool Metrics: Capacity, readiness, and utilization.
• Disk Metrics: Read/write operations and byte throughput.

Data Storage

Collected metrics are stored in an Azure Monitor workspace, providing a centralized repository for analysis and visualization.

Visualization and Alerting

Utilize Azure Monitor Metrics Explorer with PromQL or Azure Managed Grafana to:

• Visualize metrics effectively.
• Create custom dashboards.
• Configure alerts for real-time issue detection.

Getting Started

1. Enable Managed Prometheus: If not already enabled, activate Managed Prometheus on your AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) cluster.
2. Install Azure Container Storage: Deploy Azure Container Storage to your AKS cluster. This automatically begins the metrics collection process.
3. View Metrics:

1. • Access Azure Monitor Metrics Explorer to query and visualize metrics using PromQL.

1. • Use Azure Managed Grafana to build custom dashboards for deeper insights.

Key Metrics to Monitor

Storage Pool Metrics

• storage_pool_ready_state: Monitors the health and availability of storage pools.
• storage_pool_capacity_provisioned_bytes: Tracks total provisioned storage capacity.
• storage_pool_capacity_used_bytes: Monitors utilized storage capacity.

Disk Metrics

• disk_read_operations_completed_total: Counts successful read operations.
• disk_write_operations_completed_total: Counts successful write operations.
• disk_read_bytes_total: Tracks the total bytes read.
• disk_written_bytes_total: Tracks the total bytes written.

Conclusion

By leveraging Managed Prometheus with Azure Container Storage, you can gain deep insights into the performance and health of your deployments. This integration empowers you to proactively address issues, ensure workload reliability, and optimize performance. Whether you are managing critical applications or scaling stateful workloads, enhanced observability and real-time alerting enable a smoother operational experience.

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