What’s new in Observability at Build 2025

Microsoft

May 19, 2025

At Build 2025, we are excited to announce new features in Azure Monitor designed to enhance observability for developers and SREs, making it easier for you to streamline troubleshooting, improve monitoring efficiency, and gain deeper insights into application performance. With our new AI-powered tools, customizable alerts, and advanced visualization capabilities, we’re empowering developers to deliver high-quality, resilient applications with greater operational efficiency.

AI-Powered Troubleshooting Capabilities

We are excited to disclose two new AI-powered features, as well as share an update to a GA feature, which enhance troubleshooting and monitoring:

AI-powered investigations (Public Preview): Identifies possible explanations for service degradations via automated analyses, consolidating all observability-related data for faster problem mitigation. Attend our live demo at Build and learn more here.
Health models (Public Preview – coming in June 2025): Significantly improves the efficiency of detecting business-impacting issues in workloads, empowering organizations to deliver applications with operational efficiency and resilience through a full-stack view of workload health. Attend our live demo at Build to get a preview of the experience and learn more here.
AI-powered Application Insights Code Optimizations (GA): Provides code-level suggestions for running .NET apps on Azure. Now, it’s easier to get code-level suggestions with GitHub Copilot coding agent (preview) and GitHub Copilot for Azure in VS Code. Learn more here.

Enhanced AI and agent observability

Azure Monitor and Azure AI Foundry now jointly offer real-time monitoring and continuous evaluation of AI apps and agentic systems in production. These capabilities are deeply integrated with the Foundry Observability experience and allow you to track key metrics such as performance, quality, safety, and resource usage. Features include:

Unified observability dashboard for generative AI apps and agents (Public Preview): Provides full-stack visibility of AI apps and infrastructure with AI app metrics surfaced in both Azure Monitor and Foundry Observability.
Alerts: Data is published to Azure Monitor Application Insights, allowing users to set alerts and analyze them for troubleshooting.
Debug with tracing capabilities: Enables detailed root-cause analysis of issues like groundedness regressions.

Learn more in our breakout session at Build!

Improved Visualization

We have expanded our visualization capabilities, particularly for Kubernetes services:

Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana (Public Preview): Create and edit Grafana dashboards directly in the Azure Portal with no additional cost. This includes dashboards for Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) and other Azure resources. Learn more.
Managed Prometheus Visualizations: Supports managed Prometheus visualizations for both AKS clusters (GA) and Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters (Public Preview), offering a more cost-efficient and performant solution. Learn more.

Customized and Simplified Monitoring

Through enhancements to alert customization, we’re making it easier for you to get started with monitoring:

Prometheus community recommended alerts: Offers one-click enablement of Prometheus recommended alerts for AKS clusters (GA) and Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters (Public Preview), providing comprehensive alerting coverage across cluster, node, and pod levels.
Simple log alerts (Public Preview): Designed to provide a simplified and more intuitive experience for monitoring and alerting, Simple log alerts evaluate each row individually, providing faster alerting compared to traditional log alerts. Simple log alerts support multiple log tiers, including Analytics and Basic Logs, which previously did not have any alerting solution. Learn more.
Customizable email subjects for log search alerts (Public Preview): Allows customers to personalize the subject lines of alert emails including dynamic values, making it easier to quickly identify and respond to alerts.
Send a custom event from the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro (GA): Offers developers a way to track user or system actions that matter the most to their business objectives, now available in the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro. Learn more.
Application Insights auto-instrumentation for Java and Node Microservices on AKS (Public Preview): Easily monitor your Java and Node deployments without changing your code by leveraging auto-instrumentation that is integrated into the AKS cluster. These capabilities will help you easily assess the performance of your application and identify the cause of incidents efficiently. Learn more.

Enhancements for Large Enterprises and Government Entities

Azure Monitor Logs is introducing several new features aimed at supporting highly sensitive and high-volume logs, empowering large enterprises and government entities. With better data control and access, developers at these organizations can work better with IT Professionals to improve the reliability of their applications.

Workspace replication (GA): Enhances resilience to regional incidents by enabling cross-regional workspace replication. Logs are ingested in both regions, ensuring continued observability through dashboards, alerts, and advanced solutions like Microsoft Sentinel.
Granular RBAC (Public Preview): Supports granular role-based access control (RBAC) using Azure Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC). This allows organizations to have row-level control on which data is visible to specific users.
Data deletion capability (GA): Allows customers to quickly mark unwanted log entries, such as sensitive or corrupt data, as deleted without physically removing them from storage. It’s useful for unplanned deletions using filters to target specific records, ensuring data integrity for analysis.
Process more log records in the Azure Portal (GA): Supports up to 100,000 records per query in the Azure Portal, enabling deeper investigations and broader data analysis directly within the portal without need for additional tools.

We’re proud to further Azure Monitor's commitment to providing comprehensive and efficient observability solutions for developers, SREs, and IT Professionals alike. For more information, chat with Observability experts through the following sessions at Build 2025: