Monitor

Introduction

Azure Monitor is a platform service for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from Azure resources and applications. It helps you inspect activity logs and configure diagnostic settings for operational visibility. These capabilities are useful for troubleshooting, auditing, and observability workflows. For more information, see Azure Monitor overview.

LocalStack for Azure provides a local environment for building and testing applications that make use of Azure Monitor. The supported APIs are available on our API Coverage section, which provides information on the extent of Monitor’s integration with LocalStack.

Getting started

This guide is designed for users new to Azure Monitor and assumes basic knowledge of the Azure CLI and our azlocal wrapper script.

Launch LocalStack using your preferred method. For more information, see Introduction to LocalStack for Azure. Once the container is running, enable Azure CLI interception by running:

azlocal start-interception

This command points the az CLI away from the public Azure management REST API and toward the LocalStack for Azure emulator API. To revert this configuration, run:

azlocal stop-interception

This reconfigures the az CLI to send commands to the official Azure management REST API.

Create a resource group

Create a resource group to contain your Monitor demo resources:

az group create \
  --name rg-monitor-demo \
  --location westeurope

{
  "id": "/subscriptions/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000/resourceGroups/rg-monitor-demo",
  "location": "westeurope",
  "managedBy": null,
  "name": "rg-monitor-demo",
  "properties": {
    "provisioningState": "Succeeded"
  },
  "tags": null,
  "type": "Microsoft.Resources/resourceGroups"
}

Create a storage account

Create a storage account to use as a diagnostic settings destination:

az storage account create \
  --name mystore \
  --resource-group rg-monitor-demo \
  --location westeurope \
  --sku Standard_LRS

{
  ...
  "id": "/subscriptions/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000/resourceGroups/rg-monitor-demo/providers/Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/mystore",
  ...
  "name": "stmonitordoc79",
  ...
  "primaryEndpoints": {
    "blob": "https://mystore.blob.core.azure.localhost.localstack.cloud:4566",
    ...
    "table": "https://mystore.table.core.azure.localhost.localstack.cloud:4566",
    ...
  },
  ...
}

List activity logs

List recent activity logs from the subscription:

azlocal monitor activity-log list --max-events 5

[
  {
    "caller": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000",
    "category": {
      "value": "Administrative",
      ...
    },
    "eventName": {
      "value": "EndRequest",
      ...
    },
    "eventTimestamp": "2026-03-17T07:34:43.230050",
    "resourceGroupName": "rg-monitor-demo",
    "resourceProviderName": {
      "value": "Microsoft.Resources",
      ...
    },
    ...
  },
  ...
]

Create and inspect diagnostic settings

Get the resource ID of the storage account:

RESOURCE_ID=$(az storage account show \
  --name mystore \
  --resource-group rg-monitor-demo \
  --query id \
  --output tsv)

Create a diagnostic setting for the bob service of the storage account. For more information, see Diagnostic settings in Azure Monitor:

az monitor diagnostic-settings create \
  --name rg-monitor-demo \
  --resource "${RESOURCE_ID}/blobServices/default" \
  --storage-account mystore \
  --logs '[{"category":"StorageRead","enabled":true},{"category":"StorageWrite","enabled":true}]' \
  --metrics '[{"category":"Transaction","enabled":true},{"category":"Capacity","enabled":true}]'

{
  "id": "subscriptions/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000/resourceGroups/rg-monitor-demo/providers/microsoft.insights/diagnosticSettings/rg-monitor-demo",
  "name": "rg-monitor-demo",
  "logs": [
    {
      "category": "Administrative",
      "enabled": true
    }
  ],
  "metrics": [],
  "storageAccountId": "/subscriptions/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000/resourceGroups/rg-monitor-demo/providers/microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/stmonitordoc79",
  "type": "microsoft.insights/diagnosticSettings"
}

Get the diagnostic setting:

az monitor diagnostic-settings show \
  --name rg-monitor-demo \
 --resource "${RESOURCE_ID}/blobServices/default"

{
  "id": "subscriptions/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000/resourceGroups/rg-monitor-demo/providers/microsoft.insights/diagnosticSettings/rg-monitor-demo",
  "name": "rg-monitor-demo",
  "logs": [
    {
      "category": "StorageRead",
      "enabled": true
    },
    {
      "category": "StorageWrite",
      "enabled": true
    }
  ],
 "metrics": [
    {
      "category": "Transaction",
      "enabled": true,
      "retentionPolicy": {
        "days": 0,
        "enabled": false
      }
    },
    {
      "category": "Capacity",
      "enabled": true,
      "retentionPolicy": {
        "days": 0,
        "enabled": false
      }
    }
  ],
  ...
}

Update and delete diagnostic settings

Update diagnostic settings to include an additional category:

az monitor diagnostic-settings update \
  --name rg-monitor-demo \
  --resource"${RESOURCE_ID}/blobServices/default" \
  --logs '[{"category":"StorageRead","enabled":true},{"category":"StorageWrite","enabled":true},,{"category":"StorageDelete","enabled":true}]' \
  --metrics '[{"category":"Transaction","enabled":true},{"category":"Capacity","enabled":true}]'

{
  "name": "rg-monitor-demo",
 "logs": [
    {
      "category": "StorageRead",
      "enabled": true,
      "retentionPolicy": {
        "days": 0,
        "enabled": false
      }
    },
    {
      "category": "StorageWrite",
      "enabled": true,
      "retentionPolicy": {
        "days": 0,
        "enabled": false
      }
    },
    {
      "category": "StorageDelete",
      "enabled": false,
      "retentionPolicy": {
        "days": 0,
        "enabled": false
      }
    }
  ],
  "metrics": [
    {
      "category": "Transaction",
      "enabled": true,
      "retentionPolicy": {
        "days": 0,
        "enabled": false
      }
    },
    {
      "category": "Capacity",
      "enabled": true,
      "retentionPolicy": {
        "days": 0,
        "enabled": false
      }
    }
  ],
  ...
}

Delete the diagnostic setting:

az monitor diagnostic-settings delete \
  --name rg-monitor-demo \
  --resource "${RESOURCE_ID}/blobServices/default"

Features

The Azure Monitor emulator supports the following features:

Activity logs: List activity log entries for a subscription, with optional filtering by resource ID and time range.
Diagnostic settings: Create, get, update, and delete diagnostic settings on any ARM resource.
Application Insights components: Create, get, update tags, list, delete, and purge Application Insights components. Billing features (get and update) are also supported.
Action groups: Create, get, update, list (by resource group or subscription), and delete action groups.
Metric alerts: Create, get, update, list (by resource group or subscription), and delete metric alert rules.
Activity log alerts: Create, get, update, list (by resource group or subscription), and delete activity log alert rules.
Autoscale settings: Create, get, update, list (by resource group or subscription), and delete autoscale settings.
Scheduled query rules: Create, get, update, list (by resource group or subscription), and delete scheduled query rules.
Data collection rules and endpoints: Create, get, update, list (by resource group or subscription), and delete data collection rules and data collection endpoints. Create, get, list (by resource, by rule, or by endpoint), and delete data collection rule associations.
Web tests: Create, get, update tags, list (by resource group, subscription, or component), and delete availability web tests.
Workbooks and workbook templates: Create, get, update, list (by resource group or subscription), and delete workbooks. Create, get, update, list (by resource group), and delete workbook templates. Workbook revisions (get and list) are also supported.
Telemetry ingestion (data plane): Accept Application Insights SDK telemetry payloads (track), custom metrics publish, and live metrics subscription checks.
Query API (data plane): Execute and get log analytics queries, retrieve metrics, and list events.

Limitations

No data persistence across restarts: Activity logs, diagnostic settings, and all resource state are held in memory and lost when the emulator is stopped or restarted.
Activity log recording: Only non-read (non-GET) control plane operations are recorded. Data plane operations and read requests do not produce activity log entries.
Diagnostic settings are not enforced: Diagnostic settings are stored but do not route logs or metrics to the specified destination (storage account, Log Analytics workspace, or event hub).
Telemetry ingestion is a no-op: The data plane telemetry endpoints (track, publish, isSubscribed) accept payloads and return success responses, but telemetry data is not stored or queryable.
Query API returns empty results: Log analytics queries, metrics, and event queries return structurally valid but empty responses.
Autoscale rules are not evaluated: Autoscale settings are stored but scaling actions are never triggered.
Alert rule evaluation: Metric alerts, activity log alerts, and scheduled query rules are stored as resources but are never evaluated or fired.
Workbook revision history: Revisions always return the current version of a workbook; historical revision tracking is not implemented.
Components purge: The purge endpoint accepts requests and returns an operation ID, but no data is actually purged.

Samples

Explore the following samples to get started with Service Bus on LocalStack:

API Coverage

Operation ▲	Implemented ▼

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