ADX Web Explorer updates – May 2022

Microsoft

May 26, 2022

Our team has been listening to customers’ feedback and we have added new features and capabilities to increase the quality of KQL queries, improve visual data exploration, and increase productivity working with one-click ingestion.

Continue reading to learn more about:

Inline query recommendations
Dashboards drill through
Time zone setting now applicable to Dashboards
Dashboards command bar simplifications
Close all query tabs
Copy query results as HTML
Connect to ADX clusters
Support for table retention, caching & batching policies
Sample app generator support for Python & Java
Support for streaming ingestion as part of EH flow

Query recommendations

KQL (Kusto Query Language) is a powerful tool to explore your data and discover patterns, identify anomalies and outliers, create statistical modeling, and more.

Query Recommendations help you create more performant and accurate KQL queries, by following the best practices they highlight (in the form of suggestions and warnings).

You can configure the type of suggestions and warnings that will be surfaced in the query editor, by activating/deactivating them all or some (Settings --> Set query recommendations)

Note that even when all suggestions and warnings are activated, and a query has some visible recommendations, it will not be blocked from running and results can still be retrieved.

Dashboards drill through

Being able to drill down into visual data is a top priority for ADX dashboards’ users. Drill through allows you to jump between dashboard pages while using a contextual filter to explore the data.

Visually exploring data is a top priority for dashboard users. ADX dashboards drill through allows you to jump between dashboard pages while using a contextual filter to explore the data.

In many cases, you create a top-level dashboard page outlining the essence of your business. This entry page can now serve as your starting point for ad hoc data exploration by selecting a data point in the page and then using the value to filter a different page. Once selected, this other page, also called the “target page” is now opened and the data point value is used to filter the page.

Later you can continue exploring the target page or go “Back” to the original, source page in its original state (by reverting the drill-through filters).

This new capability makes it very easy to move between different dashboard pages while modifying the dashboard context, using drill-through filtering.

For more information, read this.

Time zone settings

Dashboards will now apply the time zone you’ve set in your user settings when applicable. This includes:

Zoning date and duration type parameters
Zoning date type values found in visuals (e.g., Table, Time chart, etc.)

This should provide an easy option to see dates in a specific time zone or to easily toggle between zones without changing the Operating System level settings.

Dashboards command bar simplification

As we’re constantly adding more features there was a growing need to update the command bar to better reflect the common actions done and simplify the usage.

For dashboard authors we improved the shifting between viewing and editing modes.

We moved all the less frequently used operations like time zone setting to under the right-hand ellipsis –

Close all Query tabs

Many of our customers tell us that they are working with multiple query tabs open and need an easy way to close them all at once and start querying “from scratch”.

We added “Close all tabs” capability to the tabs menu, to close all tabs except for the current one-

Note that you can use the Reopen closed tabs button (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+T) to reopen the closed tabs.

Check out additional productivity features to manage multi-query tabs environment here.

Copy query results as HTML

You can now choose to copy the result set as HTML so it can easily be shared with others:

Connect to ADX clusters on external domains

By default, Azure Data Explorer Web UI supports connecting to ADX clusters on internal domains.

Due to popular demand, we now let you configure a list of external domains that are considered safe to connect to.

Use the Settings pane à Connection to add additional trusted hosts:

Support for table retention, caching & batching policies

You can now configure retention, batching and caching policies for tables and materialized views via one-click. We have added two options under Manage tab, Table Retention policy & Table Batching policy, to let you configure these policies.

Sample app generator support for Python & Java

A new tool that allows you to create a working app to connect to your cluster and database, create table(s), ingest data (optional) and query it in your preferred programming language.

Learn more about this tool here.

Support for streaming ingestion as part of EH flow

You can now enable streaming ingestion as part of Event Hub data ingest flow. The option will toggle streaming ingestion on the selected destination table, allowing you to reduce the response time lag.