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

Chapter 3: Exploring the Azure Data Explorer UI

In Chapter 1, Introducing Azure Data Explorer, we introduced the Azure Data Explorer (ADX) Web UI and executed our first query, but we did not explore the various options and panels in detail. In the previous chapter, we focused on configuring and deploying our ADX clusters and databases, but we have not yet started to ingest data to query. In this chapter, we will cover the ADX Web UI in detail and introduce you to data ingestion using a method called one-click ingestion.

Although it is technically possible to run queries and generate visualizations from within the Azure portal, which we will demonstrate in this chapter, the Azure portal can feel distracting and cluttered with all the additional, non-ADX-related menus and options such as creating resources, Cloud Shell, and so forth. The ADX UI is a clean, uncluttered user interface (UI) that allows you to focus on exploring your data and provides options for ingesting data and creating...