Welcome back to our four-part blog series about visualizing uberAgent data in Azure Monitor. So far you have learned the basics about Azure Monitor and the search language Kusto. You created your first Kusto search as well. Also, you learned that none of the built-in visualization options nor Grafana can compete with Splunk. This is part four.
The blog-series is split as follows:
- First part: the basics
- Second part: comparing the dashboarding capabilities of Azure Monitor and Splunk
- Third part: using Grafana with Azure Monitor for uberAgent
- Fourth part (this article): conclusion
Searching in Azure Monitor Is Awesome
Azure Monitor’s search language Kusto is fun to work with. It’s intuitive to use, especially if you’ve worked with SQL or Splunk’s SPL before. It’s also very powerful! The only downside we found is that Kusto lacks the ability to use wildcards in comparisons.
Visualisations Could Use Some Work
There are several options for visualizing data in Azure Monitor:
- Azure Dashboards
- Azure Monitor Views
- Workbooks
- PowerBI
We have looked at all of them in this blog series. Unfortunately, no variant has all the features we need. What one is lacking, the other has. And vice versa.
A promising option comes from outside: Grafana. But not even Grafana provides all the functionality we would like to see in uberAgent dashboards.
Summary: Azure Monitor Visualization Capabilities
The table below illustrates how well the three technologies we examined in detail meet our requirements:
| Azure Dashboards | Workbooks | Grafana | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Interactivity | No | Partly | Partly |
| Filtering | No | Yes | Partly |
| Powerful charts | Partly | Yes | Yes |
| Variables and parameters | No | Yes | Yes |
| Packaging as an app | No | Partly | Yes |
| JavaScript support | No | No | No |
Call Out to Our Partners
The dashboards we ship with uberAgent need to work for all organizations and use cases equally well. Specific requirements from individual customers can certainly be implemented well in Workbooks or Grafana. This is a great opportunity to shine for partners focused on Azure.
