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Agora Tech Stack

Agora Jumpstart showcases Azure Monitor, Prometheus and Grafana

Microsoft today announced the release of the Agora Jumpstart for Azure Arc. Azure Arc is the Microsoft product offering which an Azure based platform for managing your infrastructure no matter where it is located - in the Azure cloud, on premise, in a data centre or with another cloud provider. Arc allows you to bring all of these together under a single management console.

Four years ago Microsoft announced the Azure Arc jumpstart - a set of tools and resources to enable customers to build up a cloud infrastructure using modular building blocks. Agora is the next sage in the evolution of this concept. Agora is designed to function as a 'market-place' for building out cloud to edge scenarios.

The Jumpstart resources feature the fictional Contoso business and provide support for building out foundational infrastructure, services and edge connectivity. They provide toolkits for following best practice and automation for spinning up a full set of enterprise resources spanning concerns such as security, data design, CI/CD and of course observability.

The jumpstart experience sets out a blueprint for standing up a tech stack encompassing Azure IoT, Cosmos DB, AKS, with Azure Monitor, Prometheus and Grafana selected as the monitoring stack. The observability architecture is split up along two lines - with Azure Monitor used for overseeing Azure Arc-enabled servers and Prometheus/Grafana deployed to manage the AKS estate.

There are a number of different options for packaging Grafana and Prometheus and the Jumpstart team have elected to use the Kube Prometheus stack. This is one of the more advanced implementations but the upside is its extensibility and built-in integrations. In the Jumpstart documentation Microsoft re-iterate their commitment to OSS and it is interesting to see Prometheus and Grafana getting the nod for the Agora observability suite. Microsoft does offer Managed services for both products in the Azure Portal, and maybe we are seeing the evolution of a MPG (Monitor, Prometheus, Grafana) stack - we shall see.

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