Book Image

Scalable Data Analytics with Azure Data Explorer

By : Jason Myerscough
Book Image

Scalable Data Analytics with Azure Data Explorer

By: Jason Myerscough

Overview of this book

Azure Data Explorer (ADX) enables developers and data scientists to make data-driven business decisions. This book will help you rapidly explore and query your data at scale and secure your ADX clusters. The book begins by introducing you to ADX, its architecture, core features, and benefits. You'll learn how to securely deploy ADX instances and navigate through the ADX Web UI, cover data ingestion, and discover how to query and visualize your data using the powerful Kusto Query Language (KQL). Next, you'll get to grips with KQL operators and functions to efficiently query and explore your data, as well as perform time series analysis and search for anomalies and trends in your data. As you progress through the chapters, you'll explore advanced ADX topics, including deploying your ADX instances using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). The book also shows you how to manage your cluster performance and monthly ADX costs by handling cluster scaling and data retention periods. Finally, you'll understand how to secure your ADX environment by restricting access with best practices for improving your KQL query performance. By the end of this Azure book, you'll be able to securely deploy your own ADX instance, ingest data from multiple sources, rapidly query your data, and produce reports with KQL and Power BI.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Azure Data Explorer
5
Section 2: Querying and Visualizing Your Data
11
Section 3: Advanced Azure Data Explorer Topics

Introducing monitoring and troubleshooting

Before diving into monitoring and troubleshooting ADX, it is worth spending some time introducing the concepts of monitoring and troubleshooting.

There is no consensus on one definition for monitoring. Engineers have various backgrounds and different interests, and if you were to ask 10 engineers for a definition of monitoring, you would probably get 15 different answers. From my perspective, monitoring is a tool that aids with troubleshooting and allows us to measure and observe system behavior. I like to use the analogy of a compass, whereby monitoring is leading us to issues and giving insights into overall behavior, health, and performance.

Monitoring can typically be broken down into four functions: alerting, debugging, trends, and plumbing. I tend to agree with this but would like to extend on the plumbing aspects. Here's an overview of these functions:

  • Alerting: Being able to notify engineers when issues occur. There...