Exploring Azure Data with Kusto and Dashboards

In order to more effectively learn Kusto (the query language powering Azure analytics, log querying and PowerBI) and data visualization capabilites in Azure, I did the following:

1. ​Created a cluster and database (this takes quite a while)

2. Open the Azure Data Explorer (a.k.a. Kusto Web Explorer) at https://aka.ms/kwe​

3. Add the cluster with the full URI or alternatively just the name.region parts (i.e. kzukusto.centralus vs https://kzukusto.centralus.kusto.windows.net)

4. Optionally add an arbitrary Application Insights app as a "virtual cluster", using a url with the format https://ade.applicationinsights.io/subscriptions/<id>/resourcegroups/<name>/providers/microsoft.insights/components/<ai-app-name>

5. Right--lick database and select Ingest new data

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6. Find some interesting Azure Open Dataset from the catalog that has an Azure storage URL readily available from the Azure Open Datasets catalog, such as the Bing COVID-19 Data (I used the .jsonl link). NOTE: the .json one will not properly infer schema because it has a root object of type array. The .jsonl is actually a "JSON fragment" (if that even exists, would be the equivalent of an XML fragment) where each entry is just a JSON entry/line in the file.

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   The JSON version is preferable to .csv because it properly infer the data type for columns.

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7. Click on Dashboards for the new stuff here. Parameters driven by queries are particularly handy:

While editing the query/widget, if the parameter is used in the query, you can interactively change its value to explore the visualizations. For example:

Whereas if it wasn't used:

After shaping the Resultsthe way you want, clicking the Visual tab allows configuring a bunch of visualizations. Inference works quite nicely if the data/results are filtered to just what you want to display.