README.md

Dashboards

Time Required: 45-60 minutes

There are three dashboards included with this demo:

• App Services
• Cosmos DB
• Traffic Manager

The following instructions will walk you through "deploying" these dashboards. There are four steps to this section.

• Step 1: Creating Permissions in Azure
• Step 2: Adding Azure Monitor as a Data Source
• Step 3: Preparing Your Dashboards
• Step 4: Building Your Dashboards

Prerequisites

1. You will need to deploy the infrastructure in this repo and have the resource names available (the JSON output from the deployment).
2. A Grafana account. You can create a free Grafana SaaS account or deploy an Azure Managed Grafana instance (outside the scope of this demo).

Step 1: Creating Permissions in Azure

Grafana needs to access two things within your subscription—the resource providers and the monitoring telemetry. The latter access can be granted at the individual resource or resource group level, depending on what you want to monitor, while the former must have access at the subscription level. For the ease of this demo, we're going to grant access for both permissions at the subscription level.

Reader Role

From a prompt, enter the following command.

NOTE: Replace <managedUserName> with a tenant-level unique username (e.g., grafana-yourAlias). Replace <subscriptionId> with the subscriptionId value from deploying the infrastructure.

NOTE: If you receive the error Unable to create service principal with azure cli from git bash shell: InvalidSchema: No connection adapters were found for 'C:/Program Files/Git/..., this is due to a bug in the shell environment within Windows. Switch to PowerShell and run the following commands.

az ad sp create-for-rbac --name <managedUserName> --role reader --scopes /subscriptions/<subscriptionId>

The above command should produce output that's similar to the following (your values will be different, and I've changed the values below for security purposes). You will need to keep this information for step 2 below.

{
  "appId": "28dd700b-b434-490d-97a5-41569aa82962",
  "displayName": "grafana-jodavi",
  "password": "aJ73k~mEzZKlUKKJwADS8fjl4VyX7Q3hLXEmIblE",
  "tenant": "413dbf3a-a77b-65f3-9014-4fd5cf25b014"
}

You've just registered an application with Azure AD. Grafana will use this information to connect to your subscription and read your resources and the resource providers.

Monitoring Reader Role

Grafana now needs access to the collected monitoring data of your resources. You will take the user/app registration you created above (in my example, it was grafana-jodavi) and grant it Monitoring Reader privileges.

Issue the following command, while replacing <appId> and _<subscriptionId> with the appId from the previous command's output and the subscription Id as you did previous.

az role assignment create --assignee <appId> --role "Monitoring Reader" --scope /subscriptions/<subscriptionId>

From the command, you should receive a response like the following (again, your values will be different):

{
  "canDelegate": null,
  "condition": null,
  "conditionVersion": null,
  "description": null,
  "id": "/subscriptions/158f44af-447e-4b80-b7c2-45c5d322159a/providers/Microsoft.Authorization/roleAssignments/247b1e0e-f9c1-4343-8958-cc1bdb8bf68e",
  "name": "247b1e0e-f9c1-4343-8958-cc1bdb8bf68e",
  "principalId": "dbf0f4d4-acb7-404a-ac27-f1035b558ea4",
  "principalType": "ServicePrincipal",
  "roleDefinitionId": "/subscriptions/158f44af-447e-4b80-b7c2-45c5d322159a/providers/Microsoft.Authorization/roleDefinitions/43d0d8ad-25c7-4714-9337-8ba259a9fe05",
  "scope": "/subscriptions/158f44af-447e-4b80-b7c2-45c5d322159a",
  "type": "Microsoft.Authorization/roleAssignments"
}

If all went well, you should see the following two assignments in your Azure subscription's Access Control (RBAC).

Step 2: Adding Azure Monitor as a Data Source

It is now time to attach Azure Monitoring in your Azure subscription to Grafana as a data source.

1. Navigate to Grafana

2. At the bottom left of your screen, click on the widget.

   

   This will take you to the Data sources page.

3. Click on the Add new data source button.

   

4. Scroll down until you see (or filter for) Azure Monitor. Then, click on it.

   

5. On the next screen, you'll enter the data you collected in step 1. Make sure you name this connection something meaningful like, "Grafana Demo" or "ToDo App Demo."

   • tenant => "Directory (tenant) ID"
   • appId => "Application (client) ID"
   • password => "Client Secret"

6. After you enter the Id's, click on Load Subscriptions. The subscription for where your app is located should load successfully.

7. Once your subscription has been found and selected, click on Save & Test.

   

8. Once you click Save & Test, you should receive a confirmation that Grafana was successfully able to connect to all Azure Monitor endpoints.

9. The last thing you will need to do before leaving this page is copy the data source identifier from the end of the URL. You will use this identifier in the next section. We will refer to in in the next section as the grafanaDataSourceId.

   

Step 3: Preparing Your Dashboards

In this next section, you will open each of the dashboards in the repository (AppServices.json, CosmosDB.json, and TrafficManager.json) and you will replace the placeholders contained in those files with the values from deploying the infrastructure, along with a few others like the data source identifier in the previous step. It will be helpful to have a text editor with good find-and-replace capabilities.

In the subsections below, I will list all of the placeholders you need to search for in each of the dashboard files. Make sure you go through each one and replace it with the correct value. Doing so is essential to deploying the files successfully. If, at any point, you make a mistake or need to start over, you can simply reload the file or copy the contents from GitHub. I will include direct links to each file location in GitHub in case you need to access the original file.

Finally, and as mentioned earlier, there will be placeholders throughout the files. The placeholder will be formatted as {variable}. The variable will reference a variable from the JSON output of deploying the infrastructure, the data source Id above, or something else for which I'll specify additional instructions.

As an example, suppose your subscription Id is 00000000-1111-2222-3333-444444444444. In the dashboard files, you will need to replace all {subscriptionId} with 00000000-1111-2222-3333-444444444444.

Refer to the tables in each subsection to ensure you've replaced all variables in the respective dashboard file.

AppServices.json (Original)

Variable	Notes
{grafanaDataSourceId}	The Grafana data source Id from step 9 in the previous section.
{resourceGroupName}
{subscriptionId}
{logAnalyticsWorkspaceId}
{primaryAppServerName}
{primaryAppSiteName}
{primaryAppServerAutoscaleName}
{primaryAppInsightsName}
{primaryManagedCertName}
{secondaryAppServerName}
{secondaryAppSiteName}
{secondaryAppServerAutoscaleName}
{secondaryAppInsightsName}
{secondaryManagedCertName}

CosmosDB.json (Original)

Variable	Notes
{grafanaDataSourceId}	The Grafana data source Id from step 9 in the previous section.
{resourceGroupName}
{subscriptionId}
{cosmosdbName}

TrafficManager.json (Original)

Variable	Notes
{grafanaDataSourceId}	The Grafana data source Id from step 9 in the previous section.
{resourceGroupName}
{subscriptionId}
{trafficManagerName}

Step 4: Building Your Dashboards

Now that you have replaced all the variables, you are ready to build and deploy your dashboards. After creating a folder to organize your dashboards, the steps are the same for building each. So, the instructions will only cover building and deploying the dashboard for App Services.

1. From within Grafana, hover over the quadrant icon and select New Folder.

   

2. For the folder name, type in something that makes sense to you (e.g. "ToDo App Demo"). Then click Create.

   

3. Do NOT click on + Create Dashboard. Instead, click on New button dropdown, and select Import.

   

   You will be taken to a page that allows you to upload the panel contents.

4. On this page, you have two options. You can either copy and paste all of the contents of the AppServices.json file, or you can upload it. After you've copied-pasted or uploaded the JSON file, click Load.

   

5. On the next screen, name your dashboard App Services, make sure the correct folder is selected (e.g., ToDo App Demo, or whatever you chose), then click Import.

6. If you updated the JSON correctly, your App Services dashboard should be loaded.

   

Whew! You've made it! You've now completed the build and deployment of the dashboard for App Services.

For your remaining two dashboards, you'll need to hover over the quadrant icon (Dashboards) on the left menu and click on + Import. From there, follow steps 4-6 above for your Cosmos DB and Traffic Manager dashboards. Make sure you follow all instructions carefully.

After you've deployed all three dashboards, you are ready to monitor your ToDo app in realtime. Congratulations!

---

  Previous  

     
    Next