Few weeks ago Microsoft released the Azure Log Analytics HTTP Data Collector API, which allows you to shoot JSON data into OMS Log Analytics. This is awesome news, because now anything is possible. This means, you are able to use (m)any script languages to send any data to OMS for further analytics and you are able to use all the nice OMS goodies like alerting, view designer for building awesome dashboards, query language for some deep dive into your data etc. I had been playing with this API on my Linux box to see what it is capable of. I use a PowerShell test script on Linux, which I knew worked before. All of a sudden I received this error…
I was wondering, because I was sure this script and my workspace is working fine. Actually I modified the script from this blog post here Azure Log Analytics HTTP Data Collector API. If I check the error code it says that workspace ID or connection key needs to be valid.
After a minute I got an idea and compared the time on my Linux box…
..and the one on my client…
..so there is a deviation of 40 minutes. I corrected the time on my Linux machine and all of a sudden the data submission worked fine. I was wondering, what the maximum allowed deviation will be . I went back in time in 5 minutes steps and after I reached a 15 minute time difference I received the same error. If I put the time back just 14 minutes, the script worked fine.
Conclusion: If you are playing with the Azure Log Analytics HTTP Data Collector API make sure your clock is set correctly otherwise you will receive a 403 error.
