MicroSoft Azure Log Analytics

If you’ve spent any time in Azure Monitor, you’ve seen some of the myriad log files that your Azure resources create. Think of all the ways that data is represented in Microsoft Azure, and imagine a way to put all your logs in a single data lake and run queries against it seamlessly!

Azure Log Analytics is a platform in which you do just that: aggregate VM and Azure resource log files into a single data lake (called a Log Analytics workspace) and then run queries against the data, using a Microsoft-created data access language called Kusto Query Language (KQL).

You’ll find that Log Analytics somehow normalizes all these different log streams into a tabular structure. You’ll also note that KQL is similar to Structured Query Language (SQL), the data access language that is standard for relational databases.