Adam Kinniburgh
VP Innovation, SquaredUp
Dashboard Gallery
Azure Application Insights dashboard
This SquaredUp dashboard uses the Azure plugin to surface key performance metrics from Application Insights. Common user experience metrics are all provided out of the box, and we can query, summarize, and analyse the raw logs and traces.
Dashboard Preview
Challenge
Accessing core application metrics that perform custom queries against the underlying Logs workspace isn’t a difficult task in the Azure Portal. However, building an Azure Application Insights dashboard that lets you bring these two sources of data together certainly can be difficult.
Being told when a certain monitor is outside of a desired threshold or when the number of unexpected entries in a Logs table exceeds a limit is also a vital step in a thorough monitoring approach, but Azure Alerts comes with a cost and is cumbersome to configure.
It's also not unusual in a world of complex, distributed applications that each component of the application might be storing data in different Application Insights and Logs workspaces, and even in different regions, subscriptions, and tenants. Getting a singular view or compiling a complete dataset is, therefore, often out of reach with the native tools.
Solution
SquaredUp lets you build a state-of-the-art Azure Applications Insights dashboard with ease, as common user experience metrics are all out of the box. Plus, by using configurable KQL data streams you can also query, summarize, and analyze the raw logs and traces being captured in the background.
When you’re building a dashboard in SquaredUp, there are never any tool-specific steps to take to craft the perfect visualization, regardless of the data source. Displaying the response time from an availability test alongside the exceptions count taken from a complex KQL query doesn’t require any heavy lifting. Then, when you need to take that a step further to calculate averages across different time periods or combine metrics into a single graph, it’s just a couple of extra clicks to bring more data into scope.
SquaredUp also breaks down the silos that Azure creates between different Application Insights and Logs workspaces. When getting your answer involves aggregating complex data sets from multiple tables, our SQL Analytics feature lets you bring in those disparate data sets and work with them using a familiar query language to create a new unified output.
Dashboard walkthrough
There are some core application metrics available out of the box with Application Insights that provide a good summary of how your application service is performing. The tiles in the left column display some of these common metrics in easy-to-understand line graphs
- Availability Test Duration reveals the time taken for your availability tests to complete. These tests will commonly check that your application is available from various Azure datacentres, and the test duration is a good measure of end user experience.
- Availability Percentage displays the overall availability measure of your application. If there are no issues, you’d expect to see a flat line sitting at 100%. Any test failures will be surfaced as drops below 100%.
- Available Memory is typically an infrastructure metric but is always a good indicator of how well your hosting service is performing. Spikes or dips in this graph could point at a number of issues.
- Process CPU Percentage is also a good indicator of hosting health, alongside Available Memory.
The other tiles on this dashboard make use of a configurable data stream that performs a custom KQL query against the Logs workspace that holds all of the data for the Application Insights instance.
This query returns some standard data being collected by Application Insights relating to requests being made to the application. This data is then filtered or aggregated to provide the remaining visualizations.
- Average Request Duration highlights the average time it takes the application to serve a request. This scalar value is created by aggregating the ‘duration’ values and returning an average.
- Highest Request Duration highlights the time it took to process the longest running request. Like the previous tile, the ‘duration’ values are aggregated and the maximum is returned.
- Requests / Hour highlights traffic over time, but grouped into hourly blocks. This is achieved by grouping the data on the timestamp value, by hour, and then returning a count of events for each hourly block. To ensure the data remains in order, the grouped data is then sorted by the new hourly timestamp.
- Similarly, the Performance Buckets donut tile uses grouping, and then an aggregated count. This metric is useful to understand the various performance cohorts, highlighting how common it is for requests to take certain periods of time to complete.
- Finally, the Events by Function donut groups and counts events based on the process name.
Create your free dashboard
As this dashboard makes use of custom KQL queries, it isn’t included as standard as part of the Azure data source, but creating it yourself is quick and easy.
- Create a free SquaredUp account.
- Add the Azure data source.
- Then start creating your dashboard using the queries you need.
To see what other dashboards you can create, including Azure dashboards, check out our Dashboard Gallery.
Read more from our blog
Azure Monitor (Part 6): Getting Started with Application Insights
What can we do with App Insights? Read to learn what it is, how to use it, and more!
Azure Resource Graph Zero to Hero
In this session, Microsoft MVP and Azure expert Billy York takes us through the basics of Azure Resource Graph, including how Kusto Query Language (KQL) is used and its limitations in Resource Graph. He then dives into some real-world examples of how you can use Azure Resource Graph with KQL.
Introducing Azure Management Talk
Azure Management Talk is a bite-sized webinar series with a focus on all things Azure Management.
5 easy steps to apply financial management to your cloud budget
Join Microsoft MVP Cameron Fuller and his colleague Tony Nguyen as they show you how the same ideas that apply to personal financial management also apply to handling your cloud consumption.
Multi-tenant resource management at scale
In this Azure Management Talk webinar with Azure MVP Martin Ehrnst we take a closer look at Azure Lighthouse.
Application Observability in a Distributed World
Join Chris Reddington, Senior FastTrack for Azure Engineer at Microsoft for this Azure Management Talk webinar. Chris will give an overview of Application Insights and how it slots into the wider Azure Monitoring ecosystem.
8 easy steps to improve your security posture in Azure
Maarten Goet gives you 8 easy steps to improve your security posture on Azure. This is a demo heavy session that no cloud engineer or developer should miss!
Kusto 101 – A Jumpstart Guide to KQL
This blog post is for anyone needing a jumpstart into the world of Kusto. (For those more advanced, look at using Kusto to aggregate and visualize data). Perhaps you’ve heard about Kusto and are just curious. Maybe you’re just starting to use Azure Monitor for your application monitoring. You might even be getting skilled up…
Working with Azure Monitor Rest API
We’re delighted to welcome back Martin Ehrnst, for another special guest blog. Martin works at Intility, one of Norway’s leading Managed Service Providers, managing a SCOM deployment covering well over 3000 on-prem servers. With the recent deprecation of the Operations Management Suite (OMS), Martin and Intility have moved to Azure Monitor for their Azure monitoring….
Tips from the field: Managing costs in Azure
Strategically lower your Azure costs by following these 10 practical tips.
Migrating to Azure: made easy with 3 handy tools
Migrating from SCOM to Azure? Learn how to make your move from on premises to the cloud easier with tools like Azure Site Recovery, Zerto or Movere.
Aggregating and Visualizing Data with Kusto
Learn how to use aggregation functions, visualize query results and put your data into context using Kusto.
Build beautiful dashboards with KQL
See what stunning dashboards you can create in SquaredUp using Kusto Query Language (KQL).
Azure Monitor (Part 9): Azure Service Health
Learn how to monitor the health of the Azure services that are relevant to your deployments.
Azure Monitor (Part 8): Alerting in Azure Monitor
Learn how to set up alerting in Azure Monitor.
Azure Monitor (Part 7): Mastering Application Performance Monitoring with Application Insights
Learn how to make the most of Application Insights and get complete visibility of your application.
Kusto: Custom Logs in Log Analytics
Part of our Kusto series, this is a thorough guide on how to use custom logs in Azure Log Analytics.
Azure Monitor (Part 5): Visualizing log analytics data with Azure Monitor
Learn how to visualize log analytics data in Azure Monitor – from dashboards to queries and workbooks.
Azure Monitor (Part 4): Working with Logs data using Kusto (KQL)
Learn where to start with KQL in Azure Monitor and how to run Kusto queries (Query explorer and builder) to make sense of your Azure Monitor Logs data.
Azure Monitor (Part 3): Azure Monitor Logs – Solutions
Learn how to get data into your Azure Monitor Log Analytics workspace—using Solutions!
Azure Monitor (Part 2): Azure Monitor Logs—Getting Started
A step-by-step guide to setting up Azure Monitor Logs. Part 2 of an Azure Monitor blog series that covers everything from the basics to advanced use cases.
Azure Monitor (Part 1): What is it and how does it work?
New to Azure Monitor? This blog series takes you from the basics, through to the most advanced use cases!
From Zero to Hero: My Azure Monitor Learning Path
New to Azure Monitor? Join me on this blog series where we learn all things Azure Monitor: everything from the basics to the most advanced use cases!
Introducing our new CTO – Rich Jones
Get to know our new CTO Rich Jones through this exclusive interview, where he shares his motivations and future plans for SquaredUp.
Meet the Tech Evangelist Group!
Say hi to our new customer-facing tech team! They’ll be doing their best to make your monitoring and SquaredUp experience that much more enjoyable.
New leaders aboard our expanding ship!
Get to know Tim Critchley (COO) and John Shaw (CPO) through this exclusive interview, where they discuss their motivations and future plans for SquaredUp.
Combine your data with...
Azure App Insights
Monitor your Azure Application Insights environment using custom Kusto queries.
Azure
Monitor your Azure environment, including VM, Functions, Cost and more.
SquaredUp has 60+ pre-built plugins for instant access to data.