The Azure Application Insights tile allows you to query Application Insights for data and display that information on your SquaredUp DS dashboard.
The ability to render information as a graph is a feature of the Azure portal rather than the App Insights Query language itself. At this time any queries run using the render statement will still return tabular or scalar data rather than graphs, depending on the tile.
You need to have an Azure Applications Insights provider before you can configure an Azure Application Insights tile. If you haven't created a provider yet, see How to add an Azure Application Insights provider.
Add a new tile to a dashboard and click on Integrations > Azure .
Choose the visualization for your tile.
A Scalar displays one value. A Scalar is useful to show a specific number like "total cost of my services" or "free disk space on this server". When a Data Stream returns multiple values (meaning a table with multiple rows), you will still be able to pick the Scalar visualization, but the Scalar will only show the value of the first row.
Example:
A table of data, for example incidents or tickets.
Tip: You can turn the individual rows into links in the settings. For example, if you're displaying tickets in your grid, you can link the rows to the ticket in your external ticket system.
Did you know? Since SquaredUp DS 5.4 users can search the grid, and temporarily change the column size and sorting of the grid (by clicking on the column headers) without having to access the settings. They can also expand a row by clicking on the three dots at the end of each row if cells are too small to show their entire content.
The tile uses the query language KQL ("Kusto"). KQL is very rich and offers features such as sorting, projection and calculated values, which you can use to control the display of data in your dashboard.
You can use the clock insert time value button to insert page timeframe and date variables in your query.
Read about the timeframe panel below to see how a timeframe in the query interacts with the timeframe panel in the tile.
Check out our GitHub Samples repository for sample KQL queries from the community that can be used in Azure tiles.
For more information about writing KQL queries see this external Microsoft article.
Example for a performance information request query for a Grid
requests
| summarize percentiles(duration, 50, 90, 95) by bin(timestamp, 1h)
Tips for Grid queries
Modify your App Insights query to only return the columns you want to display via project or project away. You can hide columns later in the settings, but filtering them directly in the query will improve performance when loading and displaying the tile.
The Azure API allows you to send a query to multiple workspaces (for Log Analytics) or applications (for App Insights) simultaneously using implicit and explicit cross-resource unions. The Log Analytics and the App Insights tile support both mechanisms, with implicit being easier but explicit offering more control over how data is returned.
Regardless of which mechanism you use, you may only query across 10 apps (for App Insights) or 10 workspaces (for Log Analytics) with a single cross-resource query (and therefore a single tile), and the provider's configured app is always used.
Using implicit Unions
When you use implicit unions, you provide a query to the tile and specify up to 9 other additional workspace/app identifiers. The query is automatically sent to the provider's configured workspace and any others you specify, and the output joined together in a single result for further processing. To configure an implicit cross-resource query:
For Azure Log Analytics tiles: In the query panel click add under additional workspaces. For Azure App Insights tiles: In the query panel click add under additional applications.
Enter an identifier for your workspace/app (using any of the formats given below) and press enter or deselect the text box.
Either repeat the process by clicking add again and adding additional workspaces/apps, or click next and continue to configure the tile.
Using explicit Unions
In contrast to implicit unions, explicit ones are specified directly within your query using the Union statement, and allow you to pull in a specific subset of the data in the other workspaces/apps. For further information check out this Azure blog post on Querying across resources.
For Azure Log Analytics tiles: The example below shows results from the provider's workspace, along with only security updates from another named contosoretail:
union Update, (workspace("contosoretail").Update | where Classification == "Security Updates" )
| where TimeGenerated >= ago(1h)
| where UpdateState == "Needed"| summarize dcount(Computer) by Classification
For Azure App Insights tiles: The example below shows results from the provider's app, along with only GET request exceptions from another named contosoretail:
union exceptions, (app("contosoretail").exceptions |where operation_Name contains "GET" )
| summarize count() by problemId
Identifiers for workspaces
The following methods are supported to identify your workspace/app:
Resource name
The human readable name of the resource.
Note: If used this must be unique to all Azure subscriptions the provider has access to or the query will fail as ambiguous.
Qualified name
The "full name" of the workspace, in the following format:
For Azure Log Analytics: <subscriptionName>/<resourceGroup>/<workspaceName>
For Azure App Insights: <subscriptionName>/<resourceGroup>/<applicationName>
Note: The qualified name may still be ambiguous as subscription names are not unique, but it is extremely unlikely.
GUID
The GUID (e.g. b438b4f6-912a-46d5-9cb1-b44069212ab4), which is completely unique and unambiguous.
For Azure Log Analytics: The GUID is the Workspace ID
For Azure App Insights: The GUID is the Application ID
For Azure App Insights: /subscriptions/<subscriptionId>/resourcegroups/<resourceGroup>/providers/microsoft.operationalinsights/applications/<applicationName>
Note: While the string is unambiguous, it is also extremely long and difficult to work with.
Timeframe:
Here you determine the timeframe for the search query.
The default timeframe is 24 hours, which means the tile will not return any entries older than 24 hours.
Take care when using a long timeframe, as this may pull many thousands of entries and significantly impact browser performance.
If your query doesn't specify a timeframe
Set the time range to the fixed time range you want to use.
If your query specifies a timeframe
If you specify a timeframe in the query (e.g. where timestamp >= ago(2h)), events must satisfy both the timeframe you set here and in the where clause in your query.
If you want to control the timeframe using only the query, set the tile timeframe to time range > all.
Note:
This tile always ignores the dynamic page timeframe set by users.
The page timeframe is the timeframe setting a dashboard is currently using. These timeframes are all relative to the current time, for example 7 days ago until now. When a user changes the page timeframe, all tiles that have use page timeframe set will adapt to the new timeframe. (Tiles that do not have use page timeframe set (i.e. are set to specific timeframe or custom timeframe) are not affected and won't change.)
The custom option can be used to set timeframes using ISO 8601 format
SquaredUp DS does not support the week notation.
Configure the settings for your visualization:
Scalar
Font size
Allows you to set the font size of the value in the tile.
Alignment
Select the scalar text alignment. Choose from left, center or right.
Unit
Allows you to add a unit to the value displayed in the Scalar tile. For example, if your value shows a time in milliseconds, you can enter "ms" or if your value shows pageviews, you can enter "pageviews".
Value formatter
Allows you to format the value by using the mustache picker. For example, you can round the value up or down or convert it.
Color
Conditional formatting:
You can display the data in different colors based on values you define here. For example, you can display the data in green when the value is below 100 and in red when it is above 100.
Click on add to configure a condition.
Click on select color.... to open the color picker. Select the color for this condition.
Enter your condition in the field next to the color. You can use the value property and manipulate it with JavaScript String and Regex APIs. When you click on the mustache picker, you'll get some examples:
Value is greater than something, less than something, etc. For example: {{value < 10}} (The color you pick will be used if the value is less than 10)
Value is present in the result (scalar tiles only) For example: value.IndexOf('error') != -1 (The color you pick will be used if the string value "error" is present in the results)
Value matches one of the regular expressions you defined (scalar tiles only) For example: value.match(/healthy|good|up/) (The color you picked will be used if the string values are healthy, good, or up)
Display:
Here you decide how the color is used:
Tile background
Highlight the tile in the color you defined.
Text foreground
Display the text in the color you defined.
Link options
Allows you to turn the graph item(s) into links. You can either enter plain text to create a fixed link (URL always stays the same) or use dynamic properties to create a dynamic link.
Dynamic links make use of dynamic properties which are inserted as part of the URL. This creates a template URL that will be resolved to an actual URL based on the items properties.
For example, if you want to link to tickets in your ticket system and the format of the URL for tickets in your system is https://www.my-system/ticket-123, where 123 is the ticket ID, you can use the dynamic property that contains the ticket ID and enter the dynamic URL https://www.my-system/ticket-{{ticketID}}.
For scalars, you can only use the dynamic property value in dynamic links, which means the link changes when the value of the scalar changes. Since a scalar is just one item, it would also make sense to use a fixed link, for example the link to the website of which you are displaying the response time.
For status icon or bars and the rows of a grid, you usually want to use a dynamic link since you get multiple items or rows that represent different things. You can use any of the dynamic properties the mustache picker offers you.
Dynamic mustache properties and values you need to change according to your instance are highlighted in bold.
Allows you to turn the graph item(s) into links. You can either enter plain text to create a fixed link (URL always stays the same) or use dynamic properties to create a dynamic link.
Dynamic links make use of dynamic properties which are inserted as part of the URL. This creates a template URL that will be resolved to an actual URL based on the items properties.
For example, if you want to link to tickets in your ticket system and the format of the URL for tickets in your system is https://www.my-system/ticket-123, where 123 is the ticket ID, you can use the dynamic property that contains the ticket ID and enter the dynamic URL https://www.my-system/ticket-{{ticketID}}.
For scalars, you can only use the dynamic property value in dynamic links, which means the link changes when the value of the scalar changes. Since a scalar is just one item, it would also make sense to use a fixed link, for example the link to the website of which you are displaying the response time.
For status icon or bars and the rows of a grid, you usually want to use a dynamic link since you get multiple items or rows that represent different things. You can use any of the dynamic properties the mustache picker offers you.
Dynamic mustache properties and values you need to change according to your instance are highlighted in bold.
You can choose between showing or hiding the header for all columns.
Expand rows automatically
Activate this checkbox if you want the row height to expand automatically based on the row content, for example if your grid uses increased text size, images, emojis etc.
Limit number of results displayed
You can set a limit of the initial number of results displayed in the grid. If you have set a limit and there are more results to display, users will see a "show all" button below the grid.
Font size
Use the slider to adjust the font size.
Tip for column sizing: You can change the column width directly in the grid by clicking on the divider lines between columns and dragging them to the width you want. You need to show column headers (by activating the show column headers check box) to be able to change the column width. Resizing columns while in edit mode affects how the grid looks by default when users open the dashboard. Users can temporarily change the column sizes by dragging them, but those changes only last until they leave the page.
Click done to save the tile.
The tile now shows data according to your settings.
