Leon Welicki: Hello there and thank you very much for joining
us today in this new Azure Portal How To video. Today, we
learn how to use Azure Monitor workbooks to get insights
and visualize your data, and for that we have Shikha Jain,
who’s going to show us how to do that. So, thank you very
much for joining us, Shikha.
Shikha Jain: Thank you, Leon, for having me here. I want
to talk about Azure Monitor workbooks, which is a new
visualization tool that’s available in the Azure portal. So,
you’re familiar with Azure portal and Monitor is something
that’s always available and always on for all the Azure
resources. Jumping into Azure Monitor, you would see
workbooks right here and workbook has something called
gallery, where you see the workbooks that I’ve already
built and some of the workbooks that are available out of
box to get you started. So, one of the things that I’m going
to do today is just start from scratch and show you how to
quickly build a workbook.
Here, I’m going to start with some of the data sources that
are available in Azure Monitor. There is metrics and query
goes against logs, and application insights and other things.
So, let’s start with metrics first. In metrics, I can select
what resources—there’s a whole list of resources that I can
start with. I’ll start with Cosmos DB account, and it gives
me access to all the subscriptions that are available, and
I can select a couple of resources. I know I'm looking for
data not in last hour but last four hours, so now let’s 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, let’s say
if I had selected storage account, it would have given me
metrics for the storage account. Now, one of the key
things that I would say is for Cosmos DB, I just want to
see how many requests are being made and then for each of
these, I also want to see how much data is being utilized. So,
let’s just add these two metrics. And now if I have multiple
metrics, I just want to see it as a grid. So, this is how
quickly you can see an at scale view. I could have added
more of my resources and got the list, and I can keep
adding metrics too. So, it gives me a very good snapshot
view. Now, since it’s a visualization tool, I can also think
about how to color code it, so it becomes a better picture
of how I want to see. So, one of the things that you would
see is for each of these metrics it also gives me a timeline.
Default it’s hidden. I can just go and say, okay, show me
a timeline and you would see the change that I see here.
For the request, you know, as it grows—currently it’s zero,
but some of them could run into millions and billions depending
on the time range, right? So, I want a more easier way to
grasp the data and for that, what we have done is we’ve
given you different column renderings. And I 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 kind of 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’s
just a count, so I’ll just say represent in thousand, and
this is where you would see how the formatting style
would be. And I could say, okay, I don’t want any digits
and then I apply. And same thing goes for data usage.
Data usage is in bytes, so I can say, okay, don’t show me
MIB. Like, I just want milli bytes and megabytes, so I can
go and select one of the things from here, which cleanly
formats the data. And as you see here, I’ve done this.
Now, the other thing I want to show you is this is metrics.
Now, I want to add data from query too. So, one of the
most common queries that we use is Azure activity. Like
it gives me activity analysis of everything that’s happening.
So, let’s start with that.
I’ll play a very simple Azure activity I’m just creating by
level. Give me seven days what’s happening there. Now
if I were to run this query, I would actually select a workspace.
So, let’s go pick one workspace.
I am just going to select one of the workspaces that I know
for sure has data and then when I run this again, you would
see it gives me information because I set the visualization
that’s set in query. Now, here is the beauty of workbooks,
where I can go and change it to tiles. Now when I change it
to tiles, it’s more readable information and to add to it, I
can also do some of the things that I wanted to quickly
show you. There is a lot of formatting available here and
I can say, okay, this one represented as thresholds to me.
So when this value is equal to let’s say error, show me a
whole list, we have a whole list of icons and then we can go
and apply here.
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’re 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. Like I could spend
another 15 minutes and what I would get is something similar
to a visualization that I have here, which is if you notice,
I’ve added parameters which allows me to select multiple
subscriptions instead of hard coded subscriptions that I had
there. And similarly, I can do different Cosmos DB accounts
that I wanted in a time range and the activity that I was
building here. So, the way you can find these is, again, 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 easy way to access it from Azure
portal as well.
Leon: This is great, Shikha. And one question, how much does
it cost?
Shikha: So, you would be surprised. This tool is free out
of box available to you anytime you have data you can
build and start using it from day one.
Leon: That’s great. Thank you very much, Shikha.
Shikha: Thank you.
Leon: So, you heard it. Thank you very much for watching.
Try this out. It’s free. Let us know what you think and look
forward to seeing you in the next video. Bye for now.