Advanced features of Azure Metrics Explorer

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In this we will learn about Metrics in Azure Monitor and advanced features of Azure metrics explorer. However, Azure Metrics are the series of measured values and counts that are collected and stored over time. There are standard (or “platform”) metrics, and custom metrics. And, the standard metrics are provided to you by the Azure platform itself. Standard metrics reflect the health and usage statistics of your Azure resources. Whereas custom metrics are sent to Azure by your applications using the Application Insights API for custom events and metrics, Windows Azure Diagnostics (WAD) extension, or by Azure Monitor REST API.

Create views with multiple metrics and charts

You can create charts that plot multiple metrics lines or show multiple metric charts at once. This functionality allows you to:

correlate related metrics on the same graph to see how one value is related to another
display metrics with different units of measure in close proximity
visually aggregate and compare metrics from multiple resources

Multiple metrics on the same chart

First, create a new chart. Click Add Metric and repeat the steps to add another metric on the same chart.

Multiple charts

Click the Add chart and create another chart with a different metric.

Order or delete multiple charts

To order or delete multiple charts, click on the ellipses ( … ) symbol to open the chart menu and choose the appropriate menu item of Move up, Move down, or Delete.

Changing aggregation

When you add a metric to a chart, metrics explorer automatically pre-selects its default aggregation. The default makes sense in the basic scenarios, but you can use a different aggregation to gain additional insights about the metric. Viewing different aggregations on a chart requires that you understand how metrics explorer handles them. However, Metrics are the series of measurements (or “metric values”) captured over the time period. When you plot a chart, the values of the selected metric are separately aggregated over the time grain. You select the size of the time grain using the Metrics Explorer time picker panel.

Further, there are five basic stats aggregation types available in the metrics explorer: Sum, Count, Min, Max, and Average. The Sum aggregation is sometimes referred as Total aggregation. For many metrics, Metrics Explorer will hide the aggregations that are totally irrelevant and cannot be used.

Firstly, Sum – the sum of all values captured over the aggregation interval
Secondly, Count – the number of measurements captured over the aggregation interval. Note that Count will be equal to Sum in the case where the metric is always captured with the value of 1.
Then, Average – the average of the metric values captured over the aggregation interval
After that, Min – the smallest value captured over the aggregation interval
Lastly, Max – the largest value captured over the aggregation interval

Apply filters to charts

You can apply filters to the charts that show metrics with dimensions. For example, if the metric “Transaction count” has a dimension, “Response type”, which indicates whether the response from transactions succeeded or failed then filtering on this dimension would plot a chart line for only successful (or only failed) transactions.

To add a filter

Firstly, select Add filter above the chart
Secondly, select which dimension (property) you want to filter
Thirdly, select which dimension values you want to include when plotting the chart (this example shows filtering out the successful storage transactions):
Then, after selecting the filter values, click away from the Filter Selector to close it. Now the chart shows how many storage transactions have failed:
Lastly, You can repeat steps 1-4 to apply multiple filters to the same charts.

Apply splitting to a chart

You can split a metric by dimension to visualize how different segments of the metric compare against each other, and identify the outlying segments of a dimension.

Apply splitting

Firstly, click on Apply splitting above the chart.
Secondly, choose a dimension on which you want to segment your chart:
Lastly, click away from the Grouping Selector to close it.

Change colors of chart lines

After you configure the charts, the chart lines are automatically assigned a color from a default palette. You can change those colors.
However, to change the color of a chart line, click on the colored bar in the legend that corresponds to the chart. The color picker dialog will open. Use the color picker to configure the color for the line.
After the chart colors are configured, they will remain that way when you pin the chart to a dashboard. The following section shows you how to pin a chart.

Create alert rules

You can use the criteria you have set to visualize your metrics as the basis of a metric based alert rule. The new alerting rule will include your target resource, metric, splitting, and filter dimensions from your chart. You will be able to modify these settings later on the alert rule creation pane.

Troubleshooting

Firstly, filters apply to all the charts on the pane. Make sure that, while you’re focusing on one chart, you didn’t set a filter that excludes all the data on another.
Secondly, if you want to set different filters on different charts, create them in different blades, save them as separate favorites. Further, if you want, you can pin them to the dashboard so that you can see them alongside each other.
Lastly, if you segment a chart by a property that is not defined on the metric, then there will be nothing on the chart. Try clearing the segmentation (splitting), or choose a different property.