Canned Canned Kusto queries and dashboards

 

Introduction:

The Azure portal allows a way to create resources, query them and display them on dashboards.  While the PowerShell automation is a great way to execute queries and leverage built-in cmdlets for Azure Resources, there are much more powerful tools with Kusto queries, Azure Resource graph explorer and dashboard elements. The portal offers several pre-written queries. This article talks about those canned queries and suggests similar treatment for dashboard panels.

Description:

Creating a dashboard for “all resources” view is as straightforward as pointing and displaying it on the Azure Portal. And the rendering of query results often involves one visualization chart that is most suitable for the results. For example, the aggregation results are best displayed by bar charts and the allocations are best depicted by pie charts. When the queries are rendered in pre-determined dashboard panels, it adds convenience to the user.

A list of queries and their corresponding dashboard panels are listed below:

1) Count Azure resources

Returns number of Azure resources that exist in the subscriptions that you have access to.

Bar chart

2) List resources sorted by name

Returns any type of resource, but only the name, type, and location properties.

List view

3) Show resources that contain storage

Returns any Azure resource that contains the word 'storage'.

Pie chart based with drill down

4) Show aliases for a virtual machine resource

Azure alias policies are used by Azure Policy to manage resource compliance. Show aliases for a virtual machine resource.

Prefix based trie view

5) Get all alerts on iot hub by type

Get all alerts on iot hub, filtered by alert type

Bar/block chart

Conclusion: Visualization of query results is an important task and one that is often thought again and again. Instead, it can be built-in and made it easy for the end-users.