Buying snapshot
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| Decision point | What Microsoft states |
|---|---|
Deployment | A scalable cloud service that can monitor applications, VMs, containers and databases in Azure, other clouds or on-premises. |
Billing basis | Usage-based, primarily on the volume of data ingested. Microsoft says listed prices are estimates; actual pricing can vary with your agreement, purchase date and exchange rate. |
How to buy | Through the Azure website, a Microsoft representative or an Azure partner. Microsoft offers a $200 credit to explore Azure for 30 days. |
Query language | Kusto Query Language (KQL) for log analysis; PromQL for metrics in an Azure Monitor Workspace. |
Dashboards | Azure Workbooks, Azure Managed Grafana and Azure Monitor dashboards for Grafana (preview), with one view across a distributed environment. |
Security and SLA | Azure SLAs back the service for Azure, multicloud and hybrid resources; data purging, encryption and audit features are included. |
Support | Billing and subscription support come with an Azure subscription; technical support is through Azure Support Plans. |
Our take
If most of what you monitor runs in Azure, start with Azure Monitor. The bigger decision is how you set it up: which log plan each table uses decides both what you pay and what you can do with the data later, so set it per table before wide collection.
Evaluate Azure Monitor
Comparisons
Where it stands out
On from day one. Azure Monitor is enabled when you create an Azure subscription, and activity logs and platform metrics are collected automatically at no cost.
Curated insights. Ready-made monitoring views for a service or set of services need minimal configuration, with distributed tracing and VM and Kubernetes cluster monitoring on top.
Log plans per table. Auxiliary and Basic Logs suit high-volume data you rarely query; Analytics Logs include querying at no extra cost, insights, alerting and up to 2 years of interactive query. All three plans can extend retention up to 12 years.
Alerts that act. Near-real-time alerts can autoscale resources when load increases.
Open instrumentation. The Application Insights .NET SDK is MIT-licensed and built on OpenTelemetry with the Azure Monitor Exporter, so telemetry can also go to other backends. Microsoft also cites integrations with third-party solutions.
Assisted investigation. The Azure Copilot Observability Agent is generally available for chat-based or deep investigation of observability data, billed at $0.01 per Azure Agent Credit (AAC).
Product screenshot
Trade-offs to weigh
Many separate meters. Alert rules are charged by the type and number of signals they watch, and notifications by type and number sent, on top of ingestion. Forecasts must cover each meter, not only data volume.
Cost control means dropping data. The Application Insights daily cap ignores excess data for the rest of the UTC day once reached; sampling also cuts what you send. Both save money by losing telemetry.
Commitment tiers lock in for 31 days. You can raise a tier at any time, but you can only lower or leave it after 31 days, and the clock restarts with every change.
Cheap plans make old data slower to reach. Basic and Auxiliary Logs give 30 days of interactive query; after that you run search jobs, which charge for data scanned plus ingesting the results.
Auxiliary Logs have gaps. Data Export on Auxiliary Logs is not yet enabled, and Workspace Replication does not currently support them.
Sentinel changes the meter. With Microsoft Sentinel on a workspace, Auxiliary and Basic Logs ingestion is billed on Sentinel meters, and Analytics Logs too in a Sentinel simplified plan tier.
Pricing and plan conditions
Log data is billed by ingestion, retention and export; standard metrics and activity logs cost nothing. The billable size excludes standard columns and any JSON wrapper. Retention is free for 30 days on Basic and Auxiliary Logs and 31 days on Analytics Logs (90 days with Microsoft Sentinel enabled, or for Application Insights data); after that it is charged per GB per month, pro-rated daily. Network costs may also apply, varying by where telemetry comes from and goes to.
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| What is charged | Published rate | Condition |
|---|---|---|
Analytics Logs ingestion | $2.30 per GB (Pay-As-You-Go) | First 5 GB/month per billing account free; log processing included. |
Analytics Logs commitment tiers | From $196 per day for 100 GB per day to $73,600 per day for 50,000 GB per day | Effective $1.96 to $1.48 per GB; 15% to 36% savings over Pay-As-You-Go; 31-day minimum. |
Basic Logs ingestion | $0.50 per GB | Log processing included; query at $0.005 per GB of data scanned. |
Auxiliary Logs ingestion | $0.05 per GB, plus $0.10 per GB log processing | No included log-processing amount; query at $0.005 per GB scanned. Processing billing start: October 1, 2025. |
Retention beyond the free period | $0.10 per GB per month (interactive); $0.02 per GB per month (long-term) | Interactive retention is for Analytics Logs, up to 2 years; long-term retention covers all three plans, up to 12 years. |
Search jobs | $0.005 per GB of data scanned | Plus normal ingestion prices for the search results. |
Data restore | $0.10 per GB per day (2 TB, 12 hour minimum) | Querying restored logs is free. |
Log Analytics Data Export | $0.10 per GB | Streaming platform logs to Storage or Event Hub: $0.25 per GB, except a free set. |
Metrics in an Azure Monitor Workspace | $0.11 /10 million samples ingested | Covers Managed Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics; includes 18 months of retention. |
Metric alerts | $0.10 per monitored time series per month | 10 monitored metric time-series per month free. |
Log alerts | $0.50 per rule per month (15-minute frequency) to $3 (1-minute) | First time series included; each added time series $0.05 to $0.30. |
Web tests | Standard: $0.0005 per scheduled test execution; multi-step: $10 per test per month | Ping web tests are free. |
Public signals
About these signals
Verified factual signals from public sources. They indicate observable activity or interest, not total adoption, product quality, or cost.
17 GitHub commits 90d615 GitHub stars0 vulnerabilities across 1 package
See all signals from 6 sources
npm · @azure/monitor-opentelemetry@1.20.1
Alternatives to Azure Monitor
The reviewed substitutes for Azure Monitor among the cloud-native monitoring, and what would make each one the better answer.
Other approaches
A different approach to the same problem. Each substitutes only for the workload named beside it.
- Datadog
- Datadog and Azure Monitor both watch the health of applications and infrastructure on Microsoft Azure. Azure Monitor comes with the Azure platform and covers its services natively; Datadog adds one view across several clouds and on-premises systems, with broader application performance monitoring.Applies to: Whether the cloud provider's own monitoring is enough, or a third-party platform is needed.
- Amazon CloudWatch
- Amazon CloudWatch and Azure Monitor collect metrics, logs and alerts for the applications and infrastructure a team runs in the cloud. CloudWatch is the monitoring service built into AWS, while Azure Monitor is Microsoft's service for Azure and puts more weight on hybrid and multicloud resources.Applies to: For teams that run workloads on both AWS and Azure and want one cloud's native service to watch all of them.
- Google Cloud Operations
- Google Cloud Operations is preferred over Azure Monitor for Google Cloud-centric application and infrastructure observability workloads. We recommend it over Azure Monitor for teams whose operational data, applications, and governance are centered on Google Cloud, while recognizing that Azure Monitor is purpose-built for Azure resources and hybrid coverage.
- Grafana Loki
- The fork is the cloud's default against a best-of-breed store. Logs land in the provider's own service with no integration work and a bill that grows with ingest and retention; Loki costs a cluster to run and keeps bodies in object storage, which is why it stays cheap at volume. Azure Monitor is the same bargain inside Azure: the platform's own logs arrive there already.