Sameer Mhaisekar
SquaredUp, Technical Evangelist
Build beautiful dashboards with KQL
So you’ve now finally finished putting all the pieces together – transitioned to Azure, deployed resources, deployed applications, got familiar with Azure Monitor and set up all the monitoring. You’re now collecting all the monitoring, application performance and security data for your Azure resources in Log Analytics workspaces, ready for analysis. (Head over to our Azure Monitor Learning Path if you're still figuring out how to do all that.)
But is only the collection enough? To actually implement any meaningful monitoring, you also have to act upon the data collected, and what’s the first step to doing that? You guessed it – visualization!
Sure, the Azure portal offers some useful platform metrics, but in addition, you also have a lot of data in your Log Analytics workspaces, stored in tables. This data can only be extracted using the Kusto Query Language (KQL). Naturally, your next goal now is to look for a way to meaningfully display this data using KQL, that is:
- Accessible to everyone (in and outside of Azure),
- Easy to make, and
- Easy to understand.
SquaredUp comes to the rescue!
Using our free universal dashboarding tool Dashboard Server or our dedicated Azure dashboarding tool SquaredUp for Azure, you can easily achieve that, and much more.
Take a look at a sample SquaredUp dashboard, made completely with KQL:
A high-level, bird’s-eye view, generically scoped dashboard, whipped up in a matter of minutes.
Impressed? There’s more!
In addition to the dashboards you can create with KQL, you can also plot your platform metrics, view cost information, and connect to any external tools using APIs. Here’s an example of a comprehensive dashboard for an application from multiple aspects:
Apart from the cool features mentioned above, you can even get deep and personal using SquaredUp perspectives - available in our dedicated Azure product SquaredUp for Azure.
This perspective here is scoped specifically to the VM you’ve browsed into to display all the VM Insights data being collected and stored for that VM:
Again, all of this is KQL!
Interested in knowing more about transforming your Azure dashboarding capabilities?
Check out:
- The Dashboard Server Learning Path to see everything you can achieve with our universal dashboarding tool
- The Azure portal vs SquaredUp dashboards series to discover the power of SquaredUp for Azure
If you'd like to see for yourself, download Dashboard Server for free or register below to take a 30-day free trial of SquaredUp for Azure!
Sameer Mhaisekar
SquaredUp, Technical Evangelist
