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Developing monitor and status dashboards

Azure Dashboards

Azure dashboards are the primary dashboarding technology for Azure. However, you can access data in log and metric data in Azure Monitor through their API using any REST client.

Limitations of Azure Dashboards

  • Limited control over log visualizations with no support for data tables. The total number of data series is limited to 10, with different data series grouped under another bucket.
  • No custom parameters support for log charts.
  • Log charts are limited to the last 30 days.
  • Log charts can only be pinned to shared dashboards.
  • No interactivity with dashboard data.
  • Limited contextual drill-down.

View designer in Azure Monitor

View Designer in Azure Monitor allows you to create custom visualizations with log data. They're used by monitoring solutions to present the data they collect.

Limitations of view designer in Azure Monitor

  • Supports logs but not metrics.
  • No personal views. Available to all users with access to the workspace.
  • No automatic refresh.
  • Limited layout options.
  • No support for querying across multiple workspaces or Application Insights applications.
  • Queries are limited in response size to 8 MB and query execution time of 110 seconds.

Azure Monitor workbooks

Workbooks are interactive documents that provide deep insights into your data, investigation, and collaboration inside the team. Specific examples where workbooks are helpful are troubleshooting guides and incident postmortem.

Limitations of Azure Monitor workbooks

  • No automatic refresh.
  • No dense layout like dashboards, which make workbooks less useful as a single pane of glass. It's intended more for providing more profound insights.

Power BI

Power BI is beneficial for creating business-centric dashboards and reports analyzing long-term KPI trends. You can import the results of a log query into a Power BI dataset to take advantage of its features, such as combining data from different sources and sharing reports on the web and mobile devices.

Limitations of Power BI

  • It supports logs but not metrics.
  • No Azure RM integration. Can't manage dashboards and models through Azure Resource Manager.
  • Need to import query results need into the Power BI model to configure. Limitation on result size and refresh.