Recently Azure Monitor team has introduced Azure Monitor workspace. This is a new resource that is described as "Azure Monitor workspaces will eventually contain all metric data collected by Azure Monitor. Currently, the only data hosted by an Azure Monitor workspace is Prometheus metrics.". So basically this new resource is a store for metrics and in future will also support Azure resource metrics. This is similar to Azure Log Analytics workspace which is store for logs. Of course Azure Log Analytics can also store metrics but Azure Monitor workspace is optimized for the structure of metrics data. We are yet to see full picture of this initiative. Currently Azure Monitor workspace is known also as Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus (Managed Prometheus). The full documentation on this new feature/service you can find here. As a long time user and expert on Azure Monitor and Log Analytics I wanted to try this feature and test its capabilities. My knowledge on Prometheus and Grafana is very little so I always like to challenge myself with such exercises. This new feature has 3 distinct scenarios:

• Using Prometheus and Grafana only – you do not have to use Log Analytics and Container Insights
• Using Prometheus and Grafana along with Log Analytics and Container Insights
• Use your own Prometheus server and send data to Azure Monitor workspace and visualize it in Grafana. You can use Log Analytics and Container Insights as additional monitoring as well.