What is KQL?
Whenever someone asks me about the most important features of Azure to learn, one of the first features I mention is KQL. KQL is the language for managing all your logging and telemetry on Azure. Even if you do not run and manage an ADX cluster, you will still need KQL for monitoring, analyzing your logs, managing your assets, exploring your security data, and exploring your ADX Application Insights data.
KQL is ADX's read-only query language that has many similarities with SQL, such as working with tables, columns, and providing functionality for filtering. For those who are not familiar with SQL, it is a query language for relational databases. As we will see later in this book, KQL supports a subset of SQL, and SQL statements can be executed and converted to KQL using the EXPLAIN
keyword, reducing the learning curve for engineers with an SQL background.
KQL is not only used directly in ADX and the ADX Web user interface (UI). If you recall Chapter 1, Introducing...