Azure Workbooks for Visualizing and Analyzing Data

Azure Workbooks allows you to create custom dashboards to visualize and analyze your data.

With Azure Workbooks, you can use a variety of data sources, including Azure Monitor, Azure Log Analytics, and Azure Storage.

You can also use pre-built templates to get started quickly, or create custom layouts to suit your needs.

Azure Workbooks supports a range of visualization types, including tables, charts, and maps.

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Data access and management in Azure workbooks is crucial to ensure that users can view or edit workbooks as needed.

Users must have the appropriate permissions to access workbooks, which are based on the permissions they have for the resources included in the workbooks.

If you're using standard Azure roles, Monitoring Reader provides read privileges, while Monitoring Contributor and Workbooks Contributor offer write privileges.

Here are the standard Azure roles that provide access to workbooks:

For custom roles, you need to add microsoft.insights/workbooks/write to the user's permissions to edit and save a workbook.

Visualizations in Azure Workbooks are incredibly powerful, allowing you to bring your data to life in a way that's easy to understand.

You can create visualizations of metric data as time-series charts, which is especially useful for tracking trends and identifying anomalies. For example, you can see the number of transactions in a storage account over the prior hour.

Azure Workbooks support a rich set of visualizations for each data source and result set, so you can choose the ones that are most useful for your data. To add a metric chart, you simply need to select the resource type, target resources, metric namespace and name, and aggregation to use.

Here are the steps to add a metric chart:

You can also add queries to Azure Workbooks to gain deeper insights into your data. To do this, select the data source for your query, and the other fields will be determined based on your choice.

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Visualizations are a powerful tool for making sense of your data. Workbooks in Azure provide a rich set of capabilities for visualizing your data.

Each data source and result set supports visualizations that are most useful for that data. For example, you can create visualizations of metric data as time-series charts.

To add a metric chart, you can select a resource type, the resources to target, the metric namespace and name, and the aggregation to use. You can also set other parameters like time range, split-by, visualization, size, and color palette.

Adding a query to an Azure Workbook allows you to query any of the supported workbook data sources. You can select the data source for your query and then enter your query or select from a list of sample queries.

Some common data sources for queries include Azure Resource Health and Azure Monitor metrics. Azure Monitor metrics provide information about an aspect of a system at a particular time.

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Here are some general steps for adding a query to an Azure Workbook:

To filter results in a table, select the Time parameter in the Time Range dropdown. This allows you to narrow down the data based on the previously created Time parameter.

You can display the results as a table by setting the Visualization to Grid. This will show the data in a clear and organized format.

To customize the columns, use the project keyword to specify a list of columns to display. For example, you can display the itemId twice, once in the details column and once in the transaction column.

The chart title can be updated in the Advanced Settings tab to give context to the data. I like to set the chart title to a descriptive name, such as "Requests".

Checking the "Show filter field above grid or tiles" box in the Advanced Settings tab allows you to add a filter input field above the table. This can be used to further filter the results in real-time.

Security and Access Control is a crucial aspect of Azure Workbooks. To ensure that only authorized users can view or edit a workbook, you need to have the appropriate permissions.

You can assign standard Azure roles to users, such as Monitoring Reader or Monitoring Contributor. These roles provide standard /read and /write privileges respectively, which are necessary for various monitoring tools to read and save data.

To edit and save a workbook, you must add the microsoft.insights/workbooks/write permission to the user's custom role. This is in addition to the standard roles mentioned earlier.

Here are the standard Azure roles that provide access to workbooks:

Accessing Azure Workbooks is a straightforward process. You can get to Azure workbooks in a few ways, including selecting Monitor > Workbooks from the menu bars on the left in the Azure portal.

To access Azure workbooks, you can also navigate to a Log Analytics workspaces page and select Workbooks at the top of the page.

These options provide a convenient way to access Azure workbooks, making it easy to create and manage your workbooks.

Here are the steps to access Azure workbooks in more detail:

Access control is crucial to ensure that only authorized users can view or edit a workbook. To achieve this, users must have the appropriate permissions.

The permissions for a workbook are based on the permissions the user has for the resources included in the workbook. Users need to have standard Azure roles that provide access to workbooks.

Monitoring Reader provides standard /read privileges that allow monitoring tools to read data from resources, including workbooks. Monitoring Contributor includes general /write privileges used by various monitoring tools for saving items, including workbooks.

For custom roles, you must add microsoft.insights/workbooks/write to the user's permissions to edit and save a workbook. This is necessary to give users the necessary privileges to save shared workbooks.

Here are the standard Azure roles that provide access to workbooks:

Note that for custom roles, you need to specifically add the microsoft.insights/workbooks/write permission to give users the ability to edit and save a workbook.