Microsoft Azure Operational Insights Preview Series – The Azure Portal Experience (Part 10)

So far:

• Microsoft Azure Operational Insights Preview Series – System Update Assessment (Part 1)
• Microsoft Azure Operational Insights Preview Series – Malware Assessment (Part 2)
• Microsoft Azure Operational Insights Preview Series – Log Management (Part 3)
• Microsoft Azure Operational Insights Preview Series – Capacity Planning (Part 4)
• Microsoft Azure Operational Insights Preview Series – Change Tracking (Part 5)
• Microsoft Azure Operational Insights Preview Series – Time Matters in Dashboard (Part 6)
• Microsoft Azure Operational Insights Preview Series – SQL Assessment (Part 7)
• Microsoft Azure Operational Insights Preview Series – Connecting Directly with Microsoft Monitoring Agent (Part 8)
• Microsoft Azure Operational Insights Preview Series – Alert Management (Part 9)

Cameron tipped me that I should write a blog post about the Azure Portal Experience for Operational Insights.

So the first step is to go to the Microsoft Azure portal and logon. In mu scenario I am using the same account that I logon to Operational Insights, After that you will go to New -> App Services –> Operational Insights.

You will see that the service is in preview and you actually you need to apply for the preview even if you are using the same account. Click on the link:

That redirects you to the preview services in Azure. Against Operational Insights click Try it now:

Popup dialog opens up so select with which subscription you want to apply for the preview service.

After a few seconds my account was accepted for the preview and now I was able to see the service in Azure Portal:

You first step is to create a workspace:

As you can see from the options for workspaces Azure knows that I have existing accounts in Operational Insight and I can select to create brand new clean state workspace or create new workspaces with one of my existing Operational Insight accounts.

I’ve tried creating new workspace linked to my existing OpInsights account using the same name but unfortunately you will need to use different name:

There are 3 tiers you can choose – Free, Standard and Premium. I will choose Free. Don’t worry you can change it later at any time.

As for location to my understanding this is the location for your workspace and not where your data will be stored. I will go into details later. Just to know that only East US is available to choose now.

Clicking OK you will see your workspace being activated. It seems I’ve stumbled on some kind of bug that shows me that I have two workspaces but actually it is only one. Only UI bug that was resolved later.

A few seconds later and the workspace is ready. Clicking on Manage opens the Operational Insights portal on your settings page:

When you click on the workspace itself opens Get started page:

On Dashboard tab you can see that it has actually transferred my Operational Insights Account information to Azure Portal (see Management Groups):

Next we click on Storage and here we can add Azure Storage accounts to our Operational Insights workspace. In those accounts you add actually your data will be stored so depending on which location you create your storage account there the data will be stored to my understanding. Let’s go and create storage account:

We have a storage account and we can associate it with out Operational Insights workspace:

As you can see I am selecting my newly created storage account and in the first screenshot I am adding storage for IIS logs and new blob is created for that data and in the second one I am adding storage for Events that will be put in a new table. I can use for both the same storage account.

What I am not sure if all other data coming from different Intelligence Packs like SQL and Change Tracking will go to this storage account or that data currently cannot be associated to storage account in Azure Portal yet.

After a coupe of hours you can see your data usage in Operational Insights portal:

And you will see that data usage showing in Azure Portal:

The good part of the ability to associate Azure Storage account is that you can configure that Storage account to show you monitoring information like availability, successful requests and etc.:

And you can see your billing information:

Of course for now all your management task are in the Operational Insights Portal and Azure Portal is more for billing and resource configurations.