An administrator is managing several production virtual machines and needs to investigate a sudden performance slowdown. The administrator wants to use an interactive charting tool directly within the Azure portal to plot numerical performance telemetry, such as CPU utilization and memory consumption, over the past 24 hours to analyze spikes and identify trends. Which tool in the Azure portal should the administrator use to plot this numerical performance data?

Metrics explorer: ### What Metrics Explorer Is **Metrics explorer** is a dedicated visualization tool integrated directly into the **Azure portal** as part of **Azure Monitor**. It is designed to plot, analyze, and correlate numerical time-series performance data emitted by cloud resources. ### How It Meets the Requirements - **Numerical Telemetry Visualization**: It specializes in rendering lightweight, numerical data points (platform metrics) such as **CPU percentage**, memory usage, and network traffic over defined intervals. - **Interactive Charting**: The administrator can easily customize time ranges (such as the last 24 hours), apply granular time aggregations (Average, Maximum, Sum), and visually identify spikes or dips in real time. - **Trend Analysis**: It allows administrators to overlay multiple metrics on a single chart or split data across dimensions to isolate bottlenecks on virtual machines. ### Key Advantages and Capabilities - **Out-of-the-Box Availability**: Automatically collects platform metrics without requiring initial agent configuration for standard host-level metrics. - **Near Real-Time Telemetry**: Metrics are stored in a lightweight time-series database supporting rapid visual rendering and fast evaluation. - **Dimension Filtering and Splitting**: Enables deep analysis by filtering specific dimensions or comparing multiple resource instances side-by-side. - **Direct Alert Rule Creation**: Allows administrators to configure **metric alert rules** directly from the chart interface when thresholds are breached. ### Why This Is Optimal **Metrics explorer** is specifically built for charting and analyzing numerical performance metrics within the portal UI, making it the most direct and effective tool for diagnosing resource utilization issues compared to log-query tools or subscription audit services.

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