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 policy management

ADX supports performance tuning via policies. These policies allow us to configure individual components of our cluster such as caching, ingestion, and retention. As you may recall from Chapter 2, Building Your Azure Data Explorer Environment, a lot of these settings can be set at the management plane level. The great benefit of policies is that we can configure these individual components without having to authorize contributor access at the management plane level. Administrators of the ADX databases, at the data plane level, can configure these policies.

In this section, we will demonstrate how to configure caching and retention policies using KQL management commands. For a complete list of policies that can be configured, please see the ADX documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/kusto/management/. The general syntax for managing policies is the same for all policies, so once you know how to configure one, configuring...