Open In App

Microsoft Azure – Using Azure Monitor Workbooks

Improve
Improve
Like Article
Like
Save
Share
Report

In this article, we will learn how to use Azure Monitor workbooks to get insights and visualize your data. Azure Monitor workbooks is a new visualization tool that’s available in the Azure portal. So, you’re familiar with the Azure portal and Monitor is something that’s always available and always on for all the Azure resources.

Implementation:

In Azure Monitor, you would see workbooks right there and the workbook has something called gallery, where you see the workbooks that you have already built and some of the workbooks that are available out of the box to get you started. 

To start with some of the data sources that are available in Azure Monitor. There is metrics and query goes against logs, application insights, and other things. So, let’s start with metrics first. In metrics, you can select what resources, there’s a whole list of resources that you can start with. 

Let us start with the Cosmos DB account, it gives you access to all the subscriptions that are available, and you can select a couple of resources.

Now, start adding the metrics. And this is where you would be familiar with metrics explorer and it would bring all the metrics associated with that resource type. So, if you had selected a storage account, it would have given you metrics for the storage account.

Now, one of the key things that you would say is for Cosmos DB, now if you want to see how many requests are being made and then for each of these,  how much data is being utilized. So, let’s just add these two metrics.

And now if you have multiple metrics, and just want to see it as a grid. So, can see an at-scale view. You can have added more of your resources and got the list, and I can keep adding metrics too. So, it gives you a very good snapshot view. 

sudo apt-get install xpaintNow, since it’s a visualization tool, you can also think about how to color code it, so it becomes a better picture of how you want to see it. So, one of the things that you would see is for each of these metrics also gives you a timeline. Default it’s hidden. You can just go to show me a timeline and you would see the change here. 

The request, as it grows could run into millions and billions depending on the time range. So, for an easier way to grasp the data and for that, what we have done is we’ve given you different column renderings. And you can easily see a heat map and kind of choose the color template and you would see the changes reflected here. So, the highest one gets highlighted. 

The other thing that is available also is customer formatting because there are different types of data that you’re dealing with. So, you could do counts, percentages, time. In this particular case, it is just a count, so just say represent in thousand, and this is where you would see how the formatting style would be. And you could say If you don’t want any digits and then apply.

And the same thing goes for data usage. Data usage is in bytes, so you can say, okay, don’t show  MIB. You can go and select one of the things from here, which cleanly formats the data. 

Now, If you want to add data from the query too. So, one of the most common queries that are used is Azure activity. You will play a very simple Azure activity, just creating by level. Now if you were to run this query, you would actually select a workspace. So, go pick one workspace, you would see it gives you information because you set the visualization that’s set in the query. 

Now, here, you can go and change it to tiles. Now when you change it to tiles, it’s more readable information, and to add to it, you can also do some of the things that you wanted to quickly show you. There is a lot of formatting available here and one is represented as thresholds to you. So when this value is equal to let’s say error, show a whole list, you have a whole list of icons and then you can go and apply. So, this is just a quick way of visualizing and building a narrative and a story that you want to tell for, you know if you are analyzing a resource or you’re debugging a problem across these resources. So, it works both at scale and at a resource level and it’s very quick and easy.

You could spend another 15 minutes and what you would get is something similar to a visualization that you have here, which is if you notice, you have added parameters that allow you to select multiple subscriptions instead of hard-coded subscriptions. And similarly, you can do different Cosmos DB accounts that you wanted in a time range and the activity that you were building here. 

So, the way you can find these is, again, to go to Azure Monitor workbooks. The blue one is the Empty Getting Started. There are these templates that you can use and the green ones are the ones that you create. And you can share these workbooks. You can pin them to the dashboard, so there is an easy way to access them from the Azure portal as well.

This tool is free out of the box available to you anytime you have data you can build and start using it.


Last Updated : 03 Apr, 2023
Like Article
Save Article
Previous
Next
Share your thoughts in the comments
Similar Reads