Provisioning an Azure Monitor Workspace

1. Start Locally

Firstly, we need to launch Locally which we can do from a terminal by running:

Once Locally has started, the Locally Dashboard will open automatically:

2. Create a Resource Group

Next we can create the Resource Group:

There's two things to note here:

1. The Azure CLI supports Automatic Configuration, meaning that it can automatically be configured to work against Locally just by prefixing commands with locally run.
2. Locally intentionally uses a different set of locations to Azure as a safety precaution, so that you can be confident you're deploying against Locally rather than regular Azure. You can also configure Locally to use the Azure locations too, but you'll want to be extra sure that you're prefixing commands with locally run when you do.

3. Create the Workspace

With the Resource Group in place, we can create the workspace. The Azure CLI calls these accounts, after the Microsoft.Monitor/accounts resource type:

{
  "note": "some fields skipped for brevity",

  "id": "/subscriptions/307d8f52-9719-460e-9f85-aa408e28ee55/resourceGroups/sample-resources/providers/Microsoft.Monitor/accounts/sample-amw",
  "metrics": {
    "prometheusQueryEndpoint": "https://sample-amw.monitor.locally:5668/"
  },
  "name": "sample-amw",
  "provisioningState": "Succeeded",
  "type": "Microsoft.Monitor/accounts"
}

The response includes a prometheusQueryEndpoint, as it does in Azure. We can read it back at any point:

We can list the workspaces in the Resource Group:

Name        Location    State
----------  ----------  ---------
sample-amw  berlin      Succeeded

And update one, here to add a tag:

{
  "name": "sample-amw",
  "tags": {
    "env": "dev"
  }
}

We can see the Azure Monitor workspace in the Locally Dashboard too:

4. Tidy up

Finally, we can tidy up. To remove just the workspace:

Or to remove the Resource Group and everything within it:

Doing this with other tooling

Whilst this guide used the Azure CLI, an Azure Monitor workspace works the same way through any of the tooling that Locally supports - a Microsoft.Monitor/accounts resource in HashiCorp Terraform or OpenTofu, Pulumi, Bicep or an ARM Template all provision against Locally in the same way, with only the location changed.

Next steps

To alert on activity in your subscription, see Alerts. To provision the rest of your monitoring alongside the workspace, see Log Analytics Workspace and Application Insights.

Should you encounter any issues, please take a look at the troubleshooting section.