Deploying Azure Monitor Workbooks with Bicep

Azure Monitor Workbooks provide rich, interactive dashboards for operational data — but creating them manually through the portal means they live outside your deployment pipeline. By defining workbooks as Bicep resources you can version-control, peer-review, and consistently deploy monitoring dashboards alongside the infrastructure they observe.

Prerequisites

You will need the Azure CLI and Bicep CLI version 0.22 or later, plus a Log Analytics workspace to target.

az bicep upgrade
az bicep version

Workbook Bicep Resource

Workbooks are stored as microsoft.insights/workbooks resources. The serializedData property holds the workbook JSON definition.

resource workbook 'microsoft.insights/workbooks@2022-04-01' = {
  name: guid(resourceGroup().id, 'ops-dashboard')
  location: location
  kind: 'shared'
  properties: {
    displayName: 'Operations Dashboard'
    serializedData: loadTextContent('workbooks/ops-dashboard.json')
    sourceId: logAnalyticsWorkspaceId
    category: 'workbook'
  }
}

Exporting an Existing Workbook

Design your workbook in the Azure Portal first, then export it via Advanced Editor to get the JSON you store in source control.

# Retrieve workbook JSON via Azure CLI and save to repo
az monitor workbook show --resource-group rg-monitoring --name my-workbook `
    --query 'properties.serializedData' -o tsv `
    | Out-File "workbooks/ops-dashboard.json"

Deploying via GitHub Actions

Trigger a workbook deployment whenever the JSON definition changes in your repository.

name: Deploy Workbooks
on:
  push:
    paths: ['workbooks/**', 'infra/workbooks.bicep']
jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: azure/login@v2
        with:
          creds: ${{ secrets.AZURE_CREDENTIALS }}
      - run: az deployment group create --resource-group rg-monitoring --template-file infra/workbooks.bicep

Summary

Storing Azure Monitor Workbooks as Bicep resources brings your monitoring configuration into the same lifecycle as your infrastructure. Teams can propose workbook changes through pull requests, ensuring dashboards are reviewed, tested, and consistently deployed across all environments.