Azure hub — family 7, Observability (2026-10-21)

What the observability family adds — Azure Monitor's current building blocks and retirements, Application Insights with the Microsoft OpenTelemetry Distro and Entra-only ingestion from Node.js, its ingestion errors, Log Analytics workspaces and queries from TypeScript, diagnostic settings, data collection rules, Azure Monitor Agent, the Logs Ingestion API, and alerts with action groups, all in Bicep and TypeScript.

markdownreferencev1KHY7-Z9PWarea: changelogchangelogrelease notesobservability family

Created 21 Oct 2026 · Modified 23 Oct 2026 · 1 version

What's in it

7 new documents including this note, bringing the hub to 108:

  • reference/monitor/what-to-use.md: which signal goes where, and what's retired (classic Application Insights, the Log Analytics agent, the Azure Diagnostics extension, the HTTP Data Collector API, diagnostic settings storage retention, the @azure/monitor-query package).
  • guides/monitor/instrument-node-app-with-opentelemetry.md: workspace and Entra-only Application Insights in Bicep, the Microsoft OpenTelemetry Distro with a managed identity, sampling, custom spans and metrics.
  • reference/monitor/application-insights-errors.md: ingestion responses (400, 401, 403), network causes, sampling, daily cap and size limits, duplicate distros.
  • reference/monitor/log-analytics-workspaces.md: workspace design, table plans, retention, access modes and roles, daily cap, queries with @azure/monitor-query-logs and the query limits.
  • reference/monitor/diagnostic-settings-and-data-collection.md: diagnostic settings rules and errors, DCR limits, Azure Monitor Agent identity, the Logs Ingestion API with a custom table, a Direct DCR and TypeScript.
  • reference/monitor/alerts.md: rule types, limits and rate limits, a metric alert and a log search alert with its own identity, why rules don't fire or fail to save, action group HTTP errors.

2026 changes captured

  • @microsoft/opentelemetry (1.5.0, Node.js 22+) is the new Microsoft OpenTelemetry Distro; by default it keeps 5 traces per second, so set tracesPerSecond: 0 to use a ratio. @azure/monitor-opentelemetry still works; never load both.
  • @azure/monitor-query is deprecated: use @azure/monitor-query-logs and @azure/monitor-query-metrics.
  • The HTTP Data Collector API needs TLS 1.2 from March 1, 2026 and reaches end of support on September 14, 2026; the Azure Diagnostics extension retired on March 31, 2026.
  • DCRs created since March 31, 2024 carry their own logsIngestion endpoint: a data collection endpoint is only needed for private link or older DCRs.

How it was checked

MicrosoftDocs/azure-monitor-docs@14cccbe2 (CC BY 4.0 docs, MIT code) and the Azure Monitor troubleshooting articles in SupportArticles-docs@ff674f85; REST specs at azure-rest-api-specs@c783b658; Bicep builds and lints clean with 0.48.1 (workspace 2026-03-01, metric alerts 2026-01-01, scheduled query rules 2026-03-01, DCRs 2024-03-11, action groups 2023-01-01, diagnostic settings 2021-05-01-preview, its only version); TypeScript compiles under tsc --strict with @microsoft/opentelemetry 1.5.0, @azure/monitor-query-logs 1.0.0 and @azure/monitor-ingestion 1.2.0; CLI commands checked against 2.91.0 help (DCR commands are in the monitor-control-service extension).

Still missing

Workbooks and dashboards, Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus and Managed Grafana (AKS child hub), metrics queries from TypeScript, Network Watcher flow logs, private link scopes (AMPLS) design, Container insights, cost optimisation for ingestion, KQL as a language.

Read this document as markdown — the same bytes an agent receives.