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A common question I see is how to present the data collected with Log Analytics. We can use View Designer in Log Analytics, PowerBI, Azure Dashboard, and Excel PowerPivot. But in this blog post, I would like to show another way to build a “report” direct in the Azure Portal for Log Analytics data.

Workbooks is a feature in Application Insights to build interactive reports. Workbooks are configured under Application Insights but it’s possible to access data from Log Analytics.

In this example, we will build a workbook for failed logins in Active Directory. The source data (event Id 4625) is collected by the Security and Audit solution in Log Analytics.

If we run a query in Log Analytics to show these events, we can easily see failed login reason and number of events. But we would also like to drill down into these events and see account names. That is not possible in Log Analytics today, and this is where workbooks can bring value.

Any Application Insights instance can be used; no data needs to be collected by the instance (no extra cost) as we will use Log Analytics as a data source. In Application Insights, there are some default workbooks and quick start templates. For this example, we will use the “Default Template.”

In the workbook, we can configure it to use any Log Analytics workspace, in any subscription, as a source. Using different workspaces for different parts of the workbook is possible. The query used in this example is shown below, note it shows data for the last 30 days.

SecurityEvent
| where AccountType == ‘User’ and EventID == 4625
| where TimeGenerated > ago(30d)
| extend Reason = case(
SubStatus == ‘0xc000005e’, ‘No logon servers available to service the logon request’,
SubStatus == ‘0xc0000062’, ‘Account name is not properly formatted’,
SubStatus == ‘0xc0000064’, ‘Account name does not exist’,
SubStatus == ‘0xc000006a’, ‘Incorrect password’,
SubStatus == ‘0xc000006d’, ‘Bad user name or password’,
SubStatus == ‘0xc000006f’, ‘User logon blocked by account restriction’,
SubStatus == ‘0xc000006f’, ‘User logon outside of restricted logon hours’,
SubStatus == ‘0xc0000070’, ‘User logon blocked by workstation restriction’,
SubStatus == ‘0xc0000071’, ‘Password has expired’,
SubStatus == ‘0xc0000072’, ‘Account is disabled’,
SubStatus == ‘0xc0000133’, ‘Clocks between DC and other computer too far out of sync’,
SubStatus == ‘0xc000015b’, ‘The user has not been granted the requested logon right at this machine’,
SubStatus == ‘0xc0000193’, ‘Account has expirated’,
SubStatus == ‘0xc0000224’, ‘User is required to change password at next logon’,
SubStatus == ‘0xc0000234’, ‘Account is currently locked out’,
strcat(‘Unknown reason substatus: ‘, SubStatus))
| project TimeGenerated, Account, Reason, Computer

In the workbook, on Column Settings, we can configure how the result will be grouped together. In this example, we will group by failed login reason and then account name.

When running the workbook, we get a list of failed login reasons and can expand to see account names and amount of failed logins. It is possible to add an extra filter to the query to remove “noise” for example accounts with less than three failed login events.
It is also possible to pin a workbook or part of a workbook, to an Azure Dashboard, to easily access the information.

In the workbook you can also add more text fields, metric fields and query fields, for example a time chart showing the amount of events per day.

A common topic around Log Analytics is ingestion time. How long time does it take before an event is visible in Log Analytics?
The latency depends on three main areas agent time, pipeline time and indexing time. This is all described in this Microsoft Docs article.

In Log Analytics or Kusto, there is a hidden DateTime column in each table called IngestionTime. The time of ingestion is recorded for each record, in that hidden column. The IngestionTime can be used to estimate the end-to-end latency in ingesting data to Log Analytics. TimeGenerated is a timestamp from the source system, for example, a Windows server. By comparing TimeGenerated and IngestionTime we can estimate the latency in getting the data into Log Analytics. More info around IngestionTime policy here.

In the image below a test event is generated on a Windows, note the timestamp (Logged).

When the event is in Log Analytics, we can find it and compare IngestionTime and TimeGenerated. We can see that the difference is around a second. TimeGenerated is the same as “Logged” on the source system. This is just an estimate, as the clocks on the server and in Log Analytics might not be in sync.

If we want to calculate the estimated latency, we can use the following query. It will take all events and estimate the latency in minutes, and order it by latency.

Event
| extend LatencyInMinutes = datetime_diff('minute', ingestion_time(), TimeGenerated)
| project TimeGenerated, ingestion_time(), LatencyInMinutes
| order by LatencyInMinutes

You can also summaries the average latency per hour, and generated a chart, with the following query. This is useful when investigating latency over a longer period of time.

Event
| extend LatencyInMinutes = datetime_diff('minute', ingestion_time(), TimeGenerated)
| project TimeGenerated, ingestion_time(), LatencyInMinutes
| summarize avg(LatencyInMinutes) by bin(TimeGenerated, 1h)

Disclaimer: Cloud is a very fast-moving target. It means that by the time you’re reading this post everything described here could have been changed completely.
Note that this is provided “AS-IS” with no warranties at all. This is not a production-ready solution for your production environment, just an idea, and an example.

A colleague and I have put together a sample view for Log Analytic to analyze and visualize Azure Firewall logs. You can download the sample view here. The sample view will visualize data around application rule and network rule log data. With view Designer in Azure Log Analytics, you can create custom views to visualize data in your Log Analytics workspace, read more about View Designer here.