Azure Dashboard – Execute Azure Log Analytics Queries

Building good, meaningful dashboards for monitored components is one of the hardest disciplines in a monitoring guys life – at least in my opinion.  One little known hero in the Azure dashboard world is the “Markdown” tile…

It has the power of running HTML fragments inside as you can see in the sample text provided…

If you think about it, it gives you endless possibilities to design your Azure portal dashboard.

I would like to show a little known trick to empower your dashboard to run Azure Log Analytics queries.

The Azure Log Analytics portal gives you an option to copy any query into a https://****** format.  You just need to click on the double ring icon…

…and your query is saved to the clipboard.

Back in the Azure portal we can then use this query to build it into the markdown tile to have the most important queries right at your fingertips. A sample tile could look like this…

I used an online HTML editor to get everything right. The code looks like this….

…and in context like this…

…copy and paste this code into the markdown tile. There are plenty of icon libraries on the internet where you can find icons to select and reference in your HTML code. I used Iconfinder for this example.

If you click on one of the links e.g. “Show last computer heartbeat record” , it will open the Azure Log Analytics portal in a new tab and execute the query (if you have permission to do so)….

This way you could build your small tile with the most important queries to enhance your monitoring / troubleshooting experience or even provide the dashboard to your operator or service desk.