Welcome to a One Day, Hands on workshop on Azure Data Explorer. Synapse Customer Success Engineering team is delighted to present this challenge based, discover by doing experience divided into 2 labs of 4 Hours each, a total of 8 hours.
- Setup Free Azure Data Explorer cluster and database
- Ingest data into ADX database
- Run Powerful KQL queries to explore the data
- Manage ADX cluster and DB using control commands and policies
- Visualize data in ADX Dashboards
Lab 1: Cluster Creation, Data Ingestion and Exploration This Lab will focus on enabling the participants to Create a free ADX cluster, and ingest data into the cluster - One click ingestion of historic data , update policy to perform ETL and write some KQL queries.
Lab 2: Advanced KQL, Policies, and Visualization This Lab will focus on enabling the participants to write Kusto queries to explore and analyze the data stored in the clusters. Participants will also create cool visualizations. It is recommended to complete the Lab 1 before beginning with Lab 2.
Earn a digital badge! In order to receive the ADX-In-A-Day completion digital badge, you will need to complete the challenges marked with ✅ in each Lab. Please submit the results using the answer sheet found at the beginning of Lab.
Data Explorer is a fully managed, high-performance, big data analytics platform that makes it easy to analyze high volumes of data in near real time. The Azure Data Explorer toolbox gives you an end-to-end solution for data ingestion, query, visualization, and management.
By analyzing structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data across time series, and by using Machine Learning, Azure Data Explorer makes it simple to extract key insights, spot patterns and trends, and create forecasting models. Azure Data Explorer is scalable, secure, robust, and enterprise-ready, and is useful for log analytics, time series analytics, IoT, and general-purpose exploratory analytics.
Note: Data Explorer exists as both a Standalone offering (Azure Data Explorer) and part of Synapse (Synapse Data Explorer). All the content will apply to both these offerings (will be referred to as 'ADX') without any change.
ADX capabilities are extended by other services built on its powerful query language, including Azure Monitor logs, Application Insights, Time Series Insights, and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Contoso is an enterprise services company that deals with data extraction, transformation, and load scenarios for it's customers who are using Azure native services like Azure Storage, Azure data factory, Azure SQL database. Constoso also maintains audit traces, system logs and telemetry from Azure services and data ETL processes. One customer recently approached Contoso asking to create a dashboard they can use to monitor their Azure SQL Database logs in a single place. Customer has agreed to provide a sample dataset to Contoso.
Contoso is planning to perform exploratory data analysis on the SQL DB logs. It is looking for a suitable analytics platform that provides out of the box integration with Azure services such as storage account for historical load and perform data analysis . Contoso is developing a SaaS application that will allow its customers to trace and monitor their system logs. Contoso wants to offer out of the box visualizations with interactive capabilities to enable its customers to drill-in/drill-out of the data and offer blazing fast loading of visualizations to its customers.
This workshop walks through the steps in designing, creating, and configuring Azure Data Explorer clusters keeping in mind these requirements. Once the cluster is deployed, this workshop enlists the steps to ingest data into ADX databases and tables using One Click ingestion.
- Either a Microsoft account (MSA) or an Azure Active Directory (AAD) identity. This will be used to create free cluster.
- Recommend completing at least one or a few of these prior to ADX-in-a-Day Labs.
- Start here: Write your first query
- 1 - Learn common operators
- 2 - Use aggregation functions
- 3 - Join data from multiple tables
- 4 - Create geospatial visualizations
- Tutorial: Route data using update policies
- Free Pluralsight training: Azure Data Explorer (includes KQL from Scratch)
- Cloud Academy: Introduction to Kusto Query Language
- Kusto Detective Agency
- Kusto Detective Agency - SANS 2023
Generally, when starting with Azure Data Explorer, you will follow the following steps (ADX Workshop Labs will cover all these steps):
- Create a free ADX cluster: To use Azure Data Explorer you first create a free cluster. An Azure Data Explorer cluster is the most basic unit.
- Create database: Each cluster has one or more databases in that cluster. Each Azure Data Explorer cluster can hold up to 10,000 databases and each database up to 10,000 tables.
- Ingest data: Load data into database tables so that you can run queries against it. Azure Data Explorer supports several ingestion methods.
- Query data: Azure Data Explorer uses the Kusto Query Language, which is an expressive, intuitive, and highly productive query language. It offers a smooth transition from simple one-liners to complex data processing scripts, and supports querying structured, semi-structured, and unstructured (text search) data. Use the web application to run, review, and share queries and results. You can also send queries programmatically (using an SDK) or to a REST API endpoint.
- Visualize results: Use different visual displays of your data in the native Azure Data Explorer Dashboards. You can also display your results using connectors to some of the leading visualization services, such as Power BI and Grafana.
- Leverage pptx files in assets folder. ADXinADay-Part1 may take 30-45 minutes to cover and ADXinADay-Part2 may take 15-30 minutes to cover.
- Recommend splitting the in a day workshop into two parts of 4hrs (wether in a single day or across multiple days) considering breaks, etc in between.
- The goal is to get attendies to complete the hands-on labs, which is where they'll find the most value, not spending too much time on the presentation.
- If you need assistance, pls feel free to log an Issue for this repo.
- See Instructor-Guidance.docx for additional information.
- For attendies that are looking for level 100-200 content recommend completing Write your first query with Kusto Query Language prior to attending this workhop lab.
- For advanced attendies looking for level 400+ content recommend completeing Kusto Detective Agency